JOKER POSTERS & THE POLITICS OF HYPOCRISY: (Order a Poster, or a T-Shirt, or a Coffee Mug Here)

You've just got to love the enduring sense of American Capitalism. While it may be down it has not given up.

Yesterday, we posted on the POTUS as the Joker poster controversy (as reported by newsbusters). The controversy is based on some posters that have mysteriously begun appearing in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

KTLA in Los Angeles, however, is reporting on one pro-Obama group that is apparently upset by the depiction of President Obama as a Socialist Joker:

Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction, politically mean spirited and dangerous.

Hutchinson is challenging the group or individual that put up the poster to have the courage and decency to publicly identify themselves.

"Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery," says Hutchinson, "it is mean-spirited and dangerous."

"We have issued a public challenge to the person or group that put up the poster to come forth and publicly tell why they have used this offensive depiction to ridicule President Obama."

However disturbed Hutchinson is by an anonymous citizen (or group of citizens) exercising their constitutional right to free speech, the hypocrisy of this apparent Obama supporter is all too transparent. In fact, it is so transparent it is a joke.

A History of Political Posters & Cartoons

Portraying elected leaders as cartoonish is as old as the Republic itself. That the internet has made the spreading of these depictions all too easy is something that will not change as long as the First Amendment still exists.

What has changed, however, is that the tactic that the Left has seemingly owned over these last eight years has been adopted by those (presumably) on the Right.

Moreoever, Joker posters of presidents is really nothing new either.

After eight years of the Left portraying former president George W. Bush in a variety of cartoonish depictions as Adolf Hitler, Howdy Doody, Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Newman, and, more recently, even as the Joker (as Vanity Fair did last year), the Left, it seems, is in a collectivist tizzy over The One being portrayed as the "agent of chaos."

Surprisingly, however, it appears that this is not the first time the concept of Barack Obama, the Joker, has been depicted.

Although the first Obama-as-the-Joker concept wasn't a picture of Obama, the inference was certainly there.

Indeed, the first Obama-related Joker poster was a painting of the late actor Heath Ledger (the one who play the Joker in the Dark Knight movie) imposed on the now famous Obama campaign "Hope" painting.

Going Viral

Over the last 24 hours, the President as the Joker poster controversary has gone viral as noted by the Christian Science Monitor.

In fact, the poster has morphed into a whole line of t-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and, of course "the poster." You can check it out and order a whole host of Obama as the Joker poster paraphenalia here.

So, while Leftists like Hutchinson can clamor all they want that the Joker poster is an "offensive depiction used ridicule President Obama," perhaps they should look in their collective mirror first. In doing so, however, they may find that the joke is really them.