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.

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