The most offensive anti-Obama billboard ever?
An ambitiously hateful billboard — created by a Colorado cartoonist with reported Tea Party ties — is being condemned by both major parties
The provocation: A new, comprehensively anti-Obama billboard in Grand Junction, Colo., is outraging both sides of the aisle. (For a look, check out the video below.) The image portrays a poker game attended by four Obama caricatures that appear to depict, respectively: A bomb-wielding Islamic terrorist, a Mexican bandit, a mobster, and a flamboyant gay man. Rats and vultures — labelled "IRS," "the Fed," and "trial lawyers" — surround the table while the top of the billboard reads, "Vote DemoRAt: Join the game." Editorial cartoonist Paul Snover (who reportedly posts his work on Tea Party websites) told local station KJCT that he created the billboard for an anonymous client: "We wanted to get people to think a little deeper."
The reaction: "Oh, really Paul?" asks ChattahBox Political News. This xenophobic, homophobic, and otherwise hateful billboard seems designed to "get people to do anything but 'think.'" The image is "beyond disrespectful," Martelle Daniels, the Democratic Party chairwoman for Colorado's Mesa County, tells The Daily Sentinel, which quotes her Republican counterpart, Chuck Pabst, voicing his own disapproval: "That kind of political positioning and statements, I think, are in bad taste," Pabst said. "It’s reprehensible...." Watch a news report on the billboard (coverage starts at 00:40):
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