'News Busters' Ribs L.A. Weekly Over Obama Joker Poster
One of the goofy ironies surrounding the brouhaha about the Obama Joker poster, which first appeared in L.A. featuring an image of Heath Ledger's movie character, the Joker, digitally morphed over Barack Obama's face, is that the original image was created by a Chicago admirer of lefty Congressman Dennis Kucinich. The identity of the image's creator was known early on in the controversy as Firas Alkhateeb, a young history student of Palestinian descent. The L.A. Times eventually profiled Alkhateeb and the evolution of his Obama Joker image from a mock Time magazine cover to a stand-alone poster, to which the unutterable word "Socialism" had been added.
This month radio show wingnut Alex Jones sponsored a contest in which listeners were encouraged to be videotaped putting up versions of the posters on public property. Jones' Prison Planet blog declares, "Obama is a front man for a cartel of fascists, monopoly men, and determined eugenicists. This is not about black or white, left or right, it is about OUR FREEDOMS!"
Any time someone like Jones says an issue is not about black or white, left or right, you can rest assured it's exactly about those issues. And about the freedom to write in upper case letters with exclamation points. Today the slightly more restrained fake-news blog News Busters delights at the fact that a Kucinich supporter created the original Obama Joker image and, as seen above, ribs the critics of the poster -- "MSNBC, the L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times" for calling "a liberal Palestinian a racist." Of course, we never did any such thing (not to mention that Alkhateeb is a U.S.-born American) but News Busters, the wannabe-hip project of the conservative Media Research Center, would never let a fact stand in the way of a bad joke.


















