The last refuge of a scoundrel

The Washington Post has admitted that the Obama presidency is a failure and indefensible.

How have they done this you ask.

Philip Kennicott has published an attempted deconstruction of the Obama as Joker poster which began appearing in Los Angeles and has since gone viral on the Internet. Mr. Kennicott first attempts to dismiss the poster as badly done political propaganda:

It is the latter makeup job that has been superimposed over the face of President Obama in an anonymous Los Angeles poster campaign that is now the talk of the blogosphere, the airwaves and the 24/7 hermeneutical speculations of cable television. The image, which appears above the word "socialism," delights and distresses people roughly on the lines of the usual political cleavage, with wide agreement that the as-yet-unrevealed artist certainly intends it to be disrespectful. But there is little consensus about whether it is effective as political messagemaking.

Comparisons to Shepard Fairey's Obama posters, which rendered the president's face a boldly contrasted palette of red and blue above the blunt message "hope," generally tend to favor Fairey's artistry. The exhausted icon of last year's political campaign, now falling off bumpers and fading on T-shirts, had both a subtlety the current poster lacks and a simplicity that it desperately needs. Fairey's image included a clever visual play on red- and blue-state political values (a windmill rendered in red, a tank and dollar sign sketched in blue), but it required only one step of mental grammar: Obama is hope.

Let's take a look at one of the Shepard Fairey posters (which our good friend the White Trash Republican has put into its proper perspective for us):

As you can see the Obama posters were made to resemble classic communist propaganda art from the old Soviet Union. I believe his was done by the Obama campaign for two reasons. One was that Obama wanted to signal people "in the know" that his centrist talk during the campaign (criticizing Bush for overspending and promising a tax cut to 95% of the population) was all just campaign smoke and mirrors to fool the hicks and hayseeds out in flyover country into believing that he was not the Marxist that his entire life story would lead any reasonable person to conclude that he was.

The other reason was simply that Obama himself felt comfortable seeing himself depicted in a way that V.I. Lenin and other communist "heros" were presented to their subjects.

But this wasn't enough for the Mr. Kennicott and the Post. They had to go beyond simply putting down the Obama/Joker poster as ineffective propaganda. They had to impugn the character of the poster's creator, and by extension the characters of anyone who likes the poster, by imputing racism to the poster's design:

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its "we need to talk this through" episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker's makeup, onto Obama's face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama's association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can't be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he's black.

You see making this poster or even liking this poster is EXACTLY THE SAME as calling Obama a nigger and wishing to see him chained to a tree and tortured with a blowtorch then hung while a cross burns in the background!

This is why I say that the Washington Post has admitted that the Obama presidency is a failure and indefensible. They have reached the final point of desperation where they present the argument that the only conceivable reason which anyone could have for disliking Obama or disagreeing with his policies is that he is black.

The mainstream media, the Washington Post leading the way, has decided that anyone critical of Obama might as well be wearing a white sheet and holding a noose. The next step will be openly using the terms "Uncle Tom", "House Nigger" and "Oreo" to describe any black person who disagrees with any aspect of Obama's agenda.

I honestly thought that it would be at least late in the second year of Obama's term before things became so bad for him that his sycophants needed to retreat to the last defensive line of accusing Obama's detractors of racism but it's happened only a little more than six months into the little tin messiah's first year.

But then I didn't count on little bammy doing so much evil so quickly.