Hey, remember when it was cool to demonize the president, or even the presidential or vice-presidential nominee? Sarahcuda had been on the national stage for all of eight weeks last year before she got the rabid vampire treatment. Ah well. Change has come to America — and to the LA Weekly. Click here and be amazed at the hypocrisy of which our intellectually superior progressive betters are capable.

As for the “noose” reference, I can almost forgive that as irresistible knee-jerk leftist racial demagoguery in the age of Obama. Here was Chris Matthews pulling the same thing on Michelle on his weekend show:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Welcome back, six months after President Obama’s inauguration, racial comments from the far right have worked their way from below the surface to open season. Take the birthers, the group that’s on the Internet and TV claiming that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is phony, that he was really born in Kenya and that week-long flap over the Harvard professor’s arrest was used by other voices on the far right as an excuse to push this stuff about the President.

(Begin clips)

GLENN BECK: This president I think that exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Well I think he’s a racial opportunist, he took that moment, used a health care conference that was a debacle basically and took this story, which is really just a local parochial law enforcement story to try and insure some sort of moment of his racial authenticity.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: This is something that diminishes the office of the presidency. He, this is, it’s all about him. It’s all about him trying to say and illustrate that he can bring about the end to this racial divide when he was the one that caused all this.

(End clips)

MATTHEWS: Gene is all this dangerous? This new flappery, this nonsense talk that is coming out here?

EUGENE ROBINSON, WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST: You know, you and I have talked in the past about dog whistle politics.

MATTHEWS: Right.

ROBINSON: This is train whistle politics.

Minor problem #1: As previously noted, Obama is a racial opportunist and not a particularly subtle one at times. Listening to Reverend Wright for 20 years will do that to a man, I guess. If Chrissy finds acknowledging that “dangerous,” there’s an easy solution: Get Obama to stop being such a jackass racial opportunist. Minor problem #2: His attack is framed in the context of Birtherism, as part of a broader “look how kooky they’ve become” lament. Did he bother to mention that Michelle expressly repudiated the Birther crap in a column last year, something which even Media Matters felt compelled to acknowledge?

But back to the poster. I think it’s stupid and was surprised to find that a bunch of other righties on Twitter agree. What’s the point, exactly? I didn’t see “Dark Knight;” was the Joker into socialism? Murder, mayhem, and deficit spending? Wasn’t his salient characteristic the fact that he was … a homicidal maniac? I realize we’re supposed to put nothing past The One but that seems a bridge too far. If people are hot for posters, why not just photoshop that “HOPE” image to make it say “BROKE”?