A little over a year ago an artist made George W. Bush resemble a comic book villain with little fanfare.  L.A. Weekly put an image of Bush as a vampire on a front cover in 2004 with no subsequent national outrage.  The photoshopped TIME portrait of President Obama as Heath Ledger’s Joker, however, has created a firestorm of debate across the country.  The image has been dubbed by some “dangerous,” “hateful,” and “mean-spirited.”  Myspace and Flickr have reportedly begun banning the pictures from user accounts.

Due to charges of the posters as “racist,” the national discourse on race relations has been reignited just weeks after Obama asserted that a white police officer acted “stupidly” in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  But what really motivated Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year old Palestinian-American attending the University of Illinois-Chicago, to create the picture?

He had no intention of distributing his work outside of his Flickr page.  The image sat in cyberspace for a few months, garnering merely a couple thousand views before a mystery individual snagged it up and inserted the word “socialism” at the bottom.  And so the Jokerbama poster was born.

Alkhateeb’s own political views fall neither to the left nor the right.  A self-proclaimed independent who “calls it like he sees it,” Firas was exercising his right to free speech.  And that’s what this is really all about.  And consistency.  Our presidents and political leaders have been lampooned in political cartoons and by artists since the 1700s.  Whatever your own personal feelings are toward the Jokerbama poster, it’s important to remember this kind of political speech is an important part of American society.  It’s what separates us from nations like North Korea and China, where people don’t have the right to express themselves freely.

In the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall:  “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”