Irony: Local Patriot Group Fear-Mongers 'Foreign Hordes' By Using Bioshock ...

[Mike]

I love American politics. Not because I think we're particularly good at it, or our so-called discourse produces anything that even approaches an interesting conversation. Rather, it's just so damned funny. You end up with both sides of a dichotomy so mouth-frothed and insane that the comedic possibilities are endless and the jokes almost tell themselves. Now that we're in the holiday season, my family loves to remind me that you can't talk religion or politics at the dinner table. If you love to laugh, how can you not talk about those things? For instance, I constantly recall the evangelist who yoinked a picture from ABC's Modern Family for his book on traditional Christian family values. I'm saying this as someone who takes great pride in making people laugh: I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

But if that example wasn't enough to sate your appetite for the absurdly ironic, let me present you with The National Liberty Federation out of Florida. The NLF is sort of a caricature of what all your really liberal friends think when you say the phrase Tea Party to them. Now, they're probably no less insane than the fringe groups on the opposite end of the political spectrum, but they are of note for posting this image on their Facebook page as a warning that all us good 'Mericans must be vigilant against the threat of the "Foreign Hordes."

Look familiar? If not, you should be able to tell by some of the Facebook comments that the NLF didn't produce this image themselves. It's from the game Bioshock Infinite and it is an image meant to satirize groups like...well...the NLF.

It is an anti-immigrant cartoon—it's just from the video game BioShock Infinite, where it's used as propaganda for the Founders, a jingoistic, xenophobic group that runs the floating city of Columbia. They're the video game equivalent of the Tea Party, and they're portrayed as a nasty group of racist white men.

Now, I'll stipulate that I don't believe that the so-called Tea Party is universally racist, anti-immigrant, evil, or even white, but you have to be a special kind of stupid to simply take an image that's meant to caricature you and then adopt it as a promotional tool for your political thought. It'd be like a group backing Barack Obama using the following image to respond to Obamacare detractors on their social media page:

It isn't that the image doesn't accurately reflect your political ideology, it's just not good practice. So, hey, Tea Party people: next time, know the story behind the images you're appropriating from other people. Or not. I need a couple of standby jokes for holiday family gatherings anyway.

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