WaPo: This is merely “play[ing] into a view of Bush popular among his detractors…”
This required a few passes to be sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks. You keep telling yourself to stop being amazed by hypocrisy and bias, but again and again someone like Philip Kennicott, a staff writer for the Washington Post, comes up with nonsense like this:
And didn’t we see George W. Bush depicted as the Joker not so long ago?Yes, in an image by Drew Friedman published online by Vanity Fair on July 29, 2008. That drawing at least played into a view of Bush popular among his detractors, that the former president was unpredictable and fast on the draw when it came to geopolitics. But the danger many of Obama’s detractors detect is more of calculating, long-standing deception, that he is quietly and secretly marshaling a socialist agenda, a view that would be better served by imagery that recalled “The Manchurian Candidate.”
A few paragraphs later the R-word is finally (and predictably) let loose and the anonymity of the artist(s) becomes an issue:
So why the anonymity? Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the “urban” makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can’t openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and ’70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.
Anonymity troubles HuffPoster Earl Ofari Hutchinson, as well:
As silly and loose screwed as the depiction of Obama is as a socialist Joker, this writer did not scream for the posters to be summarily yanked down and tossed in a Hitlerian banned-book bonfire. Instead, the call was simply for the individual or groups slapping the posters up to publicly ID themselves and take credit for their work. Come forth and take public pride in branding the president a jokester and a socialist. Don’t slink around at midnight, taking the guerilla graffiti artist’s route, and smear walls with the posters when cars disappear around the bend. That’s not the joker’s MO. It’s certainly not befitting someone who’s bold enough to call the president the Joker and a socialist.
And so Phase II begins: Put the pressure on to out the culprit.
Quashing a handbill that says so much with so little has proved impossible. The outrage increased “jOker’s” iconic stature and the attempt to stop its spread with a cry of “racism” not only didn’t work, it kinda backfired. But….
An individual or group can be destroyed, and all the Usual Suspects stand ready to Joe The Plumber/Carrie Prejean/Sarah Palin’s Family the artist(s) responsible for effectively turning the art-as-ideological-weapon tables. Oh, yes, they want a name…
And so, in these last remaining days of summer, as you head out to state fairs, family gatherings and townhall meetings, be sure to remind those who tsk-tsk your Obama-Joker shirt that putting “whiteface” on a black man is a-okay with the New York Times.
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