“I have my doubts about the person’s intelligence,” Fairey said on the phone from Pittsburgh. “It’s not grammatically correct. It would be ‘socialist’ … Obama is not Marx. He didn’t create socialism.”

Semantics aside, “I don’t agree with the political content of the poster,” Fairey said. “They don’t realize that Medicaid is a socialist program.” The federal Medicaid program, of course, predates the current administration by several decades…

“The artwork is great in that it gets a point across really quickly,” Fairey said. “The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can’t be trusted. And if they want to make that parallel with Obama — bam.”