Those jokers at the Guardian

There’s a hilarious reportorial in London’s Guardian about the lad who created the Joker image that has gone around the internet. The Guardian, recall, is a newspaper. Here is some of the news the Guardian considered worth publishing: ‘The creator of an iconic anti-Obama image is no angry conservative frustrated at corporate bailouts and healthcare reform’.

No, the art ‘was fashioned on a lark by a bored Palestinian-American on break from university’.

Indeed, the young man ‘is far from one of the red-faced protesters who have shouted down Democratic politicians at constituent meetings, nor is he a smug young conservative standing against his Obama-enthralled peers’.

When the image was adapted by those same red-faced, smug conservatives, ‘Critics from Los Angeles to Washington panned the street art as facile and obvious’. (Well, what else could they do? Praise it as ‘iconic’?)

The artist turns out to be Firas Alkhateeb, who says he favored Dennis the Menace Kucinich last year. Except for that bit of juvenile folly, I rather sympathize with Firas when he concludes: ‘After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ. From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him.’

This is a young man with imagination. I hope he doesn’t waste it wearing an explosive vest in the West Bank. Of course, if he did, the Guardian would no doubt celebrate him as a freedom fighter, and perhaps iconic to boot. Blue skies! – Dan Ford