Barack Obama, 2012 Version: A Real-Life "Joker"?

This seems like the kind of hint The Joker might drop before committing one of his more heinous felonies:

As Mr. Obama recently told a group of supporters in the deflated liberal bastion of San Francisco, ‘The Hope poster is kind of faded and a little dog-eared.’”

Just a wink and a nod towards what Obama intends to bring to the 2012 presidential campaign. The New York Times, rather politely, informs us that the theme of “hopeful, transcendent politics” has been jettisoned in favor of a combination of excuses and attacks.

You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.
-The Joker

Obama is not going to bring a knife to a gunfight. He's going to go nuclear, and if that means separating Americans by class and race, employing brown-shirts (whether of the union stripe or the #OWS variety) to sow fear and intimidation, and just plain lying his ass off, he's going to do it - in order to maintain power.

"This town deserves a better class of criminal...and I'm gonna give it to them."
~The Joker in The Dark Knight

Peter Wehner assures us, though, that Barack Obama is not a sociopath.  Same link as on top:

...the president is a man of unusually cold-blooded insincerity. To be clear: Obama is not habitually dishonest and divisive. It is not as if he can’t control his poisonous rhetoric. He simply uses those things when they’re useful to him. In that sense, Obama is not sociopathic; he’s merely ruthlessly unprincipled. Or to put it another way, he’s thoroughly post-modern, willing to construct his own truth and his own reality in the quest for power. If Obama thinks being conciliatory and civil are the roads to victory, he’ll be conciliatory and civil. If he believes incendiary rhetoric and ludicrous stereotypes are the pathway to success, he’s just as happy to employ them. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other. Whatever works. One way to express this is with references to faded, dog-eared “Hope posters.” Another, less delicate but perhaps more accurate way to express the Obama approach to politics is deeply cynical.

I don't know. Here's a psycho-analysis of the Joker.

Someone who is 'psychotic' is experiencing symptoms of psychosis, a mental disorder, which can include auditory hallucinations, such as hearing voices; visual hallucinations, where they see objects that are not truly there; or have delusional thoughts, despite evidence to show that such beliefs are incorrect -- such as believing that one's movements are being tracked by deep space satellites -- or disorganized behavior.

Think - an almost cultish belief in "global warming", a myriad of unsubstantiated claims, a persecution complex...really, what differentiates Barack Obama from the Joker?

Well, unlike the Joker on his best day, Barack Obama is going to have close to three-quarters of a billion dollars, and an army of loyal henchmen, come the 2012 elections.  Imagine the damage he could do...