This poster, a Photoshop job of Mr. Obama made up into Heather Ledger's Joker, has gone viral on the internet, even crashing websites which display it. One site I tried to visit yesterday took two minutes to load. I wonder if their advertising rates went up.

Predictably the right-wing is loving this--I haven't felt this good since I got a franchise-tax refund from the State of Texas. Finally, someone is calling a socialist a socialist. The left, however, is howling and showing themselves as being even sillier than usual. They loved George W. Bush being made into Hitler, which is surely much viler than the Joker. We are supposed to believe that this poster is racist because it shows His O'liness made up as a minstrel, which is fishing to be sure.

Steven Mikulan of the L. A. Weekly fancies that he is being trenchant when he gives us

It has a bit of everything to appeal to the drunk tank of California conservatism: Obama is in white face, his mouth (like Ledger's Joker's) has been grotesquely slit wide open and the word "Socialism" appears below his face. The only thing missing is a noose.

Notice that the point of the poster, that Obama is a socialist, is completely ignored. Without doubt Obama is a socialist, but that doesn't play in Peoria, or lots of places in tax-paying and responsible America. That Obama is a tax-and-spend socialist is the left's dirty little secret and with this sleight of hand Mikulan wants us to cringe before an absurd charge and ignore the very point of the poster.

Some years ago when Taco Bell introduced that talking chihuahua, the spokesman for a Hispanic group cried that the commercial was racist. It must have been racism of an appealing type: completely inexplicably to me, the sales of chihuahuas went up; a chihuahua is more properly understood as dog food, not a dog.

We all know true racists--people who simply cannot believe that anyone of a certain group can do anything right and who enjoy their misfortune. We also know people who are by default inclined to take a bigoted view but that view is not set in stone. A default racist, perhaps. One could call them racists by being predisposed against say blacks, but if it's not a blanket animus we'd have to declare it to be a lesser shade of racism. Not a good thing at all, but less vile than a blanket, immutable hatred.

Since the left cannot win its arguments by fact or logic, it must use thuggery. And one of the best means of thuggery is leveling foul charges, and it doesn't really matter if they're substantive or not. It's a tried-and-true technique: on Friday, October 13, 1307 (hence the idea that Friday 13 is unlucky), King Philip the Fair (really) of France, who was in debt to the Knights Templar, ordered their mass arrest. The accusations including denying Jesus, peeing on the cross and homosexual activity. The charges were enough to lead to the eventual destruction of the Knights Templar's great power and wealth. Were they true? It didn't matter and the king got his mitts into a big chunk of other people's money.

Today the left issues charges of being mean-spirited, selfish, and most of all, racist, against anyone that they don't agree with. It's easier than arguing a point, or trying to, and it's very often successful, causing people to cringe. Remember that scandal when Texaco board members were utterly traduced by a recording which did not in fact say what it was supposed to say, and by deliberate misconstruction of the tape? It was the seriousness of the charge and not the facts of the case. It's an adult, and much meaner, version of the boy on the schoolyard screaming, "Girl cooties!" and all the other boys run away.

Based on the risible and vacuum-headed declaration of Mr. Mikulan that the maker of the poster and people who find it amusing or even truthful are lynching Klansmen, I hereby declare charges of racism emitting from the left as being nothing but hot air, and an acknowledgement that they have no argument. I wonder if anyone on the left is capable any more of making a logical argument for their positions? After all, they've gotten very far by skulduggery.

Just like Don Corleone.