Okay, so some anonymous artiste has come up with this image of Barack Obama as the Joker. Apparently it was first sighted as far back as April, but it's caught on since then, posters have been made, and some liberals are whining about it. Consequently rightbloggers are crowing that turnabout is fair play, and liberals and the left (indistinguishable from that far to the right) were, like, mean to George W. Bush in the day, calling him all kinds of bad names, so suck on this, libs!That's American political discourse for you. I think it's an insult to socialists to call Obama -- center-rightist that he is -- a socialist, but I also hope that socialists have thicker skins than to worry about it.
My first thought when I heard about this was: Well, cool. Since this sort of thing is okay according to the Voice of the Republican Party and others when the target is a sitting Democratic President, then a proper response would be to apply the same makeup to various prominent Republicans. Maybe with the word "fascism" emblazoned below them. I mean, they won't mind, will they? They certainly aren't going to complain like a bunch of wussy liberals, are they? I'm just learning to work with Photoshop, so I have my work cut out for me. But a few minutes with Google showed me that great minds think alike. For example, that one up there on the, well, Right.
Or this one.
Or the lovely lady on the right.
Or this one. No one seems to have applied the makeup to a picture of Dick Cheney yet, but he's an obvious choice.
But enough of this trivia, when there are more important political issues to discuss, like the death of Michael Jackson, or what's going to happen to Kate and Jon?
P.S. August 16, 2009. I just found this one, and this blog post which adds a few more to the pics I found. (Still none of Cheney, though -- is the Dark Lord hunting down and shooting in the face anyone who defiles his image?) I don't agree with the blogger's take on this foofooraw, but all that hard work deserves acknowledgement.
P.P.S. March 12, 2010: And still, the only image of Cheney as Joker I can find is this one, which is pretty poor stuff.