An article in Thursday’s Washington Post lashed out at the viral Obama-as-the-Joker posters, attacking them as promoting "coded," "racially charged" images. Art critic Philip Kennicott smeared the images, which have been showing up in Los Angeles, as flat-out bigoted: "The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can't be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he's black." [Emphasis added]

In the August Style 6 piece, Kennicott provided this incendiary take on the poster campaign: "Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time." The Post writer did acknowledge that a similar image deriding Bush as the villainous character appeared in the Vanity Fair in 2008. But he spun this Joker poster as somehow worse:

Tom Shales wasn’t alone in praising Obama in the Washington Post today. Art critic Philip Kennicott acted embarrassed that the Smithsonian's American history museum would already put on an exhibit honoring Barack Obama’s inauguration at the 100-day mark, even if they had a good reason:

The Smithsonian hasn't mounted an exhibit like this, for a sitting president, in recent memory, if ever. And it's not doing it because it's historic -- George W. Bush's first election, which hung in the balance for weeks, was also historic -- the Smithsonian is doing it because Obama has the peculiar, hard-to-define but easy-to-spot power of the superstar.

Obama trumps Reagan in image management, Kennicott declared:

We've come a long way since the press was wowed by President Ronald Reagan's carefully constructed images. Although there were images of photographers photographing him, the ideal Reagan image eliminated the photographer in an effort to create a transparent, perfect window on the spectacle of power. Today, the presence of the photographer is celebrated. Obama is the cynosure of all lenses.

Just as segregation in the South “blunted the force of moral outrage against the Nazis” during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Washington Post arts critic Philip Kennicott contended in a Saturday lead “Style” section piece on a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the 1936 games, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have also undermined arguments against Chinese political repression before the Olympic games there this summer.

Deep into his May 10 treatise, “Playing With Fire: U.S. Holocaust Museum Revisits Fascist Iconography of 1936 Games and Beyond,” Kennicott asserted:

It's impossible to walk through the current exhibition without feeling a repetition syndrome. Just as Jim Crow laws blunted the force of moral outrage against the Nazis, the specter of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has blunted the force of arguments about Chinese political repression.