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.

While some narrow-minded philistines complained, the artistic establishment heaped praise (and money) on these and works like them. The National Endowment for the Arts was so impressed with Serrano’s work they granted him $15,000 courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. For his effort, Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award.

Other recent Turner Prize honorees include Damien Hirst, whose works feature livestock suspended in formaldehyde, and Tracy Elmin, whose nominated work was an unmade bed. The Turner Prize is named in honor of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), renowned as the original “painter of light” (pace Thomas Kinkade). (One of the Stuckists, a group of anti-conceptual figurative painters who demonstrate annually against the Prize, puckishly said, “The only artist who wouldn’t be in danger of winning the Turner Prize is Turner.”)

Art and Popular Culture defines “transgressive art” as: “art forms that aim to transgress; i.e., to outrage or violate basic mores and sensibilities.”

The French, naturally, have a phrase for it: “Epater la bourgeoisie,” or to shock mainstream sensibilities. Or as Andy Warhol put it, “Art is what you can get away with.”

Hirst, the formaldehyde artist, said early in his career, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off.’ But after a while you can get away with things.”

And oh boy, did he. Hirst holds the record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist. His Lullaby Spring, a medicine cabinet filled with pills (and not even real ones with pharmacological effects), sold at auction for $19.2 million to the Emir of Qatar. And in two auction days in 2008, Hirst sold $198 million worth of, well, stuff.

The key phrase, however, is “what you can get away with.” And this is determined by the artistic establishment. Shocking the middle classes is one thing. Shocking the art establishment is quite another. And when those sensibilities largely overlap, as they do in these early, halcyon days of the Obama administration, then woe betide anyone who dares to draw outside the lines set by the media-education-government complex.

A year after 9/11, Hirst said, “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually… You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”

Indeed, the post-9/11 era produced a veritable flowering of transgressive political art, most of it directed at one particular individual hated by the artistic establishment: George W. Bush. When it came to Bush, to go from Warhol to Cole Porter, “anything goes.” No depiction was too grotesque.

Since most artists are highly constrained by political correctness of the leftist sort, when it came to depicting Bush, the constraints fell away, and an almost ecstatic cruelty was unleashed. Years from now, the art it produced will be an embarrassment to its creators (if it is remembered at all — never underestimate people’s ability to forget their mistakes).

Much has been made of the recent poster popping up around Los Angeles depicting President Obama as the Joker.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, said: “Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery, it is mean-spirited and dangerous.”

My own quibble with the poster isn’t the subject-matter, but that the depiction is a bit stale (the Joker is so 2008) and the caption is too on-the-nose. I would have liked a little more wit or wordplay in the caption. (Perhaps we should have a caption contest?)

Nevertheless, anybody who’s subscribed to Vanity Fair or watched The Daily Show has no standing to express outrage at the Obama Joker poster (or to object to any fatuousness). And whatever you think of the poster, its creator has more cojones than all of the anti-Bush comedians, artists and columnists put together. Because artists and other cultural figures today are more like the sheep preserved in that Hirst glass case pictured above than they care to admit.

So what follows is a refresher course on the level of respect artists held for the office of president during Bush’s tenure, a rogue’s gallery of bad taste:

Here’s the illustration (done by Drew Friedman) that Vanity Fair posted on their website, almost exactly one year before the Obama version appeared:

And here are some comments on the Vanity Fair site:

“Great stuff from the talented Friedman (as always).”

“Very good!!!”

“Brilliant and profound.”

(Unbelievable as it seems, I don’t think they were being sarcastic.)

Then there’s the ultimate online insult, so heinous it has its own law (Godwin’s). Search “Bush as Hitler” on Google images and you get more than 1.6 million results. One of many:

And remember the ever-popular “Bush as chimp” caricatures? (These were the very height of Shavian wit.) So many to choose from, here’s just one:

Speaking of “on-the-nose,” a Google image search of “Bush as devil” turns up more than 3 million hits. Here’s one:

And if a single evil metaphor isn’t enough for you, there are numerous mix-and-match combinations, such as this mash-up of Bush as Hitler and Satan:

And let’s not forget this tastefully done portrait. It first appeared as a cover for the Village Voice and then popped up on countless T-shirts, posters, and even an episode of HBO’s “True Blood”:

If you prefer a healthy dollop of racism in your mockery, you don’t have to look further than this cartoon, which oh-so-cleverly tweaks Bush’s Secretary of State:

The LA Weekly didn’t much care for the Obama poster (despite their past championing and displaying of similarly tacky anti-Bush propaganda). Their blogger commented (weirdly), “The only thing missing is a noose.” Of course, when the noose was on Sarah Palin’s (boo! hiss!) neck, they thought that was just (and I quote) “Super!”

One of the cardinal sins a leftist can commit is to “Other,” which is “the demonization and dehumanization of groups.” Postmodernists like to make much of this, blaming the West for “othering” minorities, foreigners, and Asians, among other people. (Of course, they never mention that the reverse is usually even more virulent.)

As the pictures above demonstrate, in the past eight years, what the left has done to Bush, and to Republicans in general, is to “other” them: to demonize them, to treat them like some alien entity that is less than human, undeserving of common decency.

And what the left experience, when they see the Joker posters pop up, is what psychologists call “projection” — the tearing-down process they subjected Bush to, they fear will happen to their hero. They fear that Obama’s opponents will succeed in reducing their icon to a laughingstock like Bush was (and is — for now).

To paraphrase Obama’s erstwhile spiritual advisor: The cultural establishment’s chickens have come home to roost.

The website Newsbusters points out the silliness behind the outrage – after all, President Bush has been depicted as far worse – he’s been portrayed as everything from a bloodsucking vampire in the Village Voice, to the Joker in Vanity Fair, to God forbid, a Republican- everywhere else. No one seemed to mind then. And while people like Bill Maher point out that Obama has been only at this job for six months (whereas Bush earned the bile over eight years) and therefore any criticism is unfair – that’s pure batpoop. Hatred for Bu$hitler began the moment he took office, and the vile lefties only knew Sarah Palin for a few weeks before they were wearing t-shirts with her face and a vulgar word (begins with ‘C’ and rhymes with bunt) beneath it.

And besides, if you ask me, this new Obama Joker face is pure street art that only elevates his hip persona. It’s no different than the Shepard Fairey ‘Hope’ poster, except it’s far more complimentary and honest. Seriously, we live in a culture where anti-heroes have replaced heroes, and we all know that Ledger’s Joker is far cooler than Bale’s Batman. (At least the Joker didn’t yell at his mom at the premiere.) The Joker scoffed at traditional values, reveled in post-modern humor and more important – was played by Heath Ledger, who’s dead! You can’t get any cooler than that, even if you add a Prince Albert and a nitrous addiction.

Finally, as so many Obamalovers point out, our President is more than a President, he’s a pop culture icon – and you can’t go more than five feet in Times Square without seeing a t-shirt, a button, or a jock strap with his face plastered on it.

At least with these new posters, the media has a message.

Also – a reminder for tonight: Mike Baker, Remi Spencer, Barret Swatek, and Ab News!

Daniel Kurtzman’s written for the San Francisco Chronicle and ridiculed Sarah Palin over at The Huffington Post. His political humor blog can be found at About.com. 

Under the heading,”Michael Steele: Republican Clown,” Kurtzman posted this at About.com which, by the way, is owned by the New York Times:

Hang a few posters of Obama as Joker under a freeway overpass and the Left completely loses it. Do the exact same with a Republican and off in the distance all you hear is the gentle chirp of country crickets on a warm summer night.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe Those-Who-Cry-Racist didn’t know about this. Well, now they do and we should all look forward to the equal-opportunity outrage about to hit the Old Gray Lady.

Or not.

Yesterday, when the “L.A. Weekly” went all crybaby over the Obama-Joker poster, they must have known that they themselves had published a cover portraying Bush as a blood-thirsty vampire. But all’s fair in love and war and this is ideological war where hypocrisy is a weapon, not something to be ashamed of.

The Left wants Obama-Joker nipped in the bud, and their goal is to stigmatize it as something racist before it shows up on t-shirts all over the country — before it catches fire.

Like Zorro with his “Z,” this artist strikes anonymously — and who can blame the desire for anonymity. No one even knows who this person is (he or she might be an Obama fan who thinks the posters are cool), and already the “R-Word” has been thrown about. Imagine if this individual is found to be anti-Obama. Remember Politico digging up dirt on a private citizen who merely asked Obama a question; the coordinated attack on Sarah Palin’s family courtesy of Hollywood and the media? Hell, Carrie Prejean agreed with Obama on gay marriage and look what they did to her. No, anonymity is probably a good idea.

Here’s another reason to stay in the shadows — a political reason:

When Obama has no one to attack, he must address the issue of his socialist policies directly, instead of attacking critics (or more accurately, using the media to do it for him). Personally, I hope the artist is a little, old, African American lady from Compton.

Personally, I hope the first person to give me a hard time over my Obama-Joker t-shirt is wearing something Leftist-approved, like something found here. That kind of irony doesn’t come along every day.