If President Obama resembles any of the Batman’s rogues’ gallery at all closely, it would be either The Riddler or The Penguin.
The Riddler (Edward Negma) was a confidence trickster and thief who used mind games and deceptive words to fool people into doing things to their own supposed benefit- that in the end, only benefited him. After which he would be laughing- and sneering- at them behind their backs.
The Penguin (Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot III) was a more direct crook. He specialized in constructing complex,interlocking systems of influence and “mutual self-interest” that were nearly impossible for an outsider to understand, but in the end funneled money, and the power that went with it, back to him. His trademark trick was to rob not only the law-abiding, but his fellow crooks as well, and do it so cleverly that they never realized they’d been taken.
A keynote of both criminals’ modus operandis was that while they both preferred to avoid violence on grounds of personal risk, they would unhesitatingly employ violence when it was the best or most expedient option. In such a situation, neither one engaged in any “deviousness” -they both simply struck to kill.
The Joker was not a “mere” anarchist; he was a nihilist who, if he could have figured out how to kill the entire human race, would have done so without a second’s hesitation, even if he went with it. In this respect, he more closely resembles the terrorists of the last four decades, who no matter what “ideologies” they espouse, worship destruction for its own sake and neither know nor care what would replace the societies they wish to erase from the face of the Earth. To them, as with the
Clown Prince of Crime, death and destruction are their own rewards. While such entities constitute an existential threat, they are more easily dealt with by the authorities, whether they be named Gotham PD or the Department of Defense.
The far greater threat to a polity is a Riddler, or a Penguin- who uses its own mechanisms to empower themselves at the expense of all others, and revel in the belief of their own superiority over those others.
An enemy which seeks power by boring from within will always be more dangerous overall than one which attacks from without- even if the latter can more easily be tracked by following his trail of destruction.
(Truth in advertising; Among other things, I’m a longtime fan of The Batman, almost solely through the comics, specifically “Detective Comics”. If all you know about him and his adversaries is from TV and movie depictions, you have only a very slight conception of what “really goes on” in Gotham City. Which, BTW, was based on Boston, MA, not New York.)
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