Johnp Perazzo: Obama Joker vs. Bush Joker
Caricatured portraits of Barack Obama wearing Heath Ledger-style"Joker" makeup, with the caption "socialism" situated just beneath the President's image, have been displayed recently on numerous outdoor surfaces — telephone poles, blank walls, highway supports, etc. – in the city of Los Angeles.
obama joker2
Though the identity of the Photoshop artist is unknown to anyone, the Christian Science Monitor concludes, disapprovingly, that "a conservative graffiti artist" is the culprit. Adds the Monitor: "Now, digitized copies of the portraits have gone viral, spiraling across Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Predictably, the right-wing blogosphere is bursting at the seams with glee."
Even more predictably, leftists have begun to complain that the portrait is racist. According to Bedlam Magazine, for instance: "The Joker white-face imposed on Obama’s visage has a sort of malicious, racist, Jim Crow quailty to it." The good folks at L.A. Weekly, meanwhile, tell us that the portrait "has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger’s Joker's) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word ‘Socialism’ appears below his face. The only thing missing is a noose."
As Matthew Vadum has already noted in NewsReal, in 2004 the very same L.A. Weekly ran this picture depicting President George W. Bush as Dracula, his mouth dripping with the blood of innocents from around the world:
BushDracula
Then there was this classic published by The Village Voice in October of that same year, showing Bush as a vampire sucking the blood of Liberty from the metaphorical neck of our nation:
Bushstatue
And just 13 months ago, Vanity Fair depicted Bush as none other than, voila, the Joker! With no chorus of complaints from the Left!
BushJoker
Notably, these caricatures of Bush appeared neither on solitary highway stanchions nor on the walls of buildings in vacant lots, but rather in major publications of the political and social Left. This is to say nothing of the many published cartoons that routinely depicted Bush as a primate. One September 2007 Huffington Post story, in fact, actually bore the title, "New Scientific Study Reveals Bush Is a Chimp."
What would be the Left's reaction if a conservative were to make a similar assertion about Obama?
Bush was also commonly caricatured by the Left as Adolph Hitler. The anti-war demonstrations of 2002-2004 — led by such Marxist "peace" coalitions as International ANSWER (a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party) and United For Peace and Justice (led by the pro-Castro communist Leslie Cagan) — featured multitudes of banners and placards depicting Bush as the Nazi Führer...
Read entire article at Newsreal
obama joker2Though the identity of the Photoshop artist is unknown to anyone, the Christian Science Monitor concludes, disapprovingly, that "a conservative graffiti artist" is the culprit. Adds the Monitor: "Now, digitized copies of the portraits have gone viral, spiraling across Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Predictably, the right-wing blogosphere is bursting at the seams with glee."
Even more predictably, leftists have begun to complain that the portrait is racist. According to Bedlam Magazine, for instance: "The Joker white-face imposed on Obama’s visage has a sort of malicious, racist, Jim Crow quailty to it." The good folks at L.A. Weekly, meanwhile, tell us that the portrait "has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger’s Joker's) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word ‘Socialism’ appears below his face. The only thing missing is a noose."
As Matthew Vadum has already noted in NewsReal, in 2004 the very same L.A. Weekly ran this picture depicting President George W. Bush as Dracula, his mouth dripping with the blood of innocents from around the world:
BushDracula
Then there was this classic published by The Village Voice in October of that same year, showing Bush as a vampire sucking the blood of Liberty from the metaphorical neck of our nation:
Bushstatue
And just 13 months ago, Vanity Fair depicted Bush as none other than, voila, the Joker! With no chorus of complaints from the Left!
BushJokerNotably, these caricatures of Bush appeared neither on solitary highway stanchions nor on the walls of buildings in vacant lots, but rather in major publications of the political and social Left. This is to say nothing of the many published cartoons that routinely depicted Bush as a primate. One September 2007 Huffington Post story, in fact, actually bore the title, "New Scientific Study Reveals Bush Is a Chimp."
What would be the Left's reaction if a conservative were to make a similar assertion about Obama?
Bush was also commonly caricatured by the Left as Adolph Hitler. The anti-war demonstrations of 2002-2004 — led by such Marxist "peace" coalitions as International ANSWER (a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party) and United For Peace and Justice (led by the pro-Castro communist Leslie Cagan) — featured multitudes of banners and placards depicting Bush as the Nazi Führer...