Obama = Joker = Racism?

This is not a post-racial presidency, Virginia. Not a chance. It was always obvious that as soon as President Obama got into a jam that our liberal friends would start playing the race card. And so they have.

Someone has been putting up posters in Los Angeles and elsewhere featuring the president as The Joker--as played by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. According to Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker, it means the end of the fantasy,

It is starting. Open mockery of Barack Obama, as disillusionment sets in with the man, his policies, and the phony image of a race-healing, brilliant, scholarly, middle-of-the-roader.

You could easily see what was coming next. Racism! Yes, the usual suspects are accusing the president's critics of being racist. From Toby Harnden in the British Daily Telegraph:

The liberal tabloid "LA Weekly", which depicted George W. Bush, the former president, as Dracula on its cover in 2004, denounced the Obama-Joker poster as virulently racist.

"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," wrote its blogger Steven Mikulan. "The only thing missing is a noose."

This is an important warning to conservatives everywhere. As things go south for President Obama our liberal friends are going to get increasingly desperate. They will reach for the race card again and again. Conservatives will have to learn how to respond with the appropriate degree of courage and scorn. Fortunately there are examples of appropriate scorn that we can use.

1. Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy: "You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
2. Dirty Harry to a punk: "Go ahead. Make my day."
3. Rhett Butler to Scarlett: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

I tell you. What's not to like?

But there is a serious side to this. For too long, decent Americans have been afraid, afraid to be tagged as racists. This must stop. Because there is one thing you need to defend freedom, justice, and the American Way. And that is courage. In America in 2009, in 2010 and beyond, if you are going to defend freedom you are going to need the courage to risk being called a racist.