English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

This image was posted to CNN on October 11, 2001. I remember saving it back then because it was funny (duh) but also because it was revealing that you had these two disparate cultures at war, and here was this slippage of the one into the other. What does the dialectic of Bert and Bin Laden suggest as an image? It makes Bin Laden look like an idiot (as friendly and nice as Bert is). What's funny is that the effect is so obviously unintentional.