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'Situation Room Meme' Continues: This Time, All The Men Are Removed

The "Situation Room photo" and the things that clever folks are doing with it have taken on lives of their own since the White House released the image of President Obama and his top advisors anxiously monitoring events on the day U.S. commandos killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

As Know Your Meme says, it's "a photoshopping trend."

We've seen cats, superheroes and even the little girl who looked so grumpy on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the royal wedding appear in pranksters' versions of the image. The Atlantic and Funny City have collected many of the best efforts.

And here's one that works on a couple levels. The website Free Williamsburg, riffing off the news we posted about earlier this week regarding a Hasidic newspaper that removed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and one of the president's top counterterrorism advisers from the picture because they're women, took all the men out of the photo:

As Free Williamsburg says, "sorry folks, we were finding those images of a tense Obama and Biden too scintillating to handle."

Here's the untouched original:

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President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and members of his national security team, including Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Pete Souza / White House
/
White House
President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and members of his national security team, including Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.