(Newser) – President Obama photoshopped to look like a witch doctor, a caveman, and a thug recently appeared, not on the Facebook page of a misbehaving teen, but on the official Facebook page of the Mecklenburg County Republican Committee. The photos have been there for months, the Washington Post reports, but apparently started getting widespread attention this week. Now the Virginia Republican Party has officially told the affiliate to take the pictures down.

"These kinds of images have no place in political discourse—period," says the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. "They are offensive, tasteless and should never have been posted anywhere, let alone a local unit’s Facebook page." The executive director of the group that brought the images to light calls them racist, saying they "seek to portray our president, and black men more broadly, as, quote unquote, savages." But the chairman of the committee, who posted most of the pictures, says anyone who's offended just doesn't have a sense of humor. He laughed off news that the Republican Party wanted the pictures removed, and they were still up as of this afternoon. (Read more Barack Obama stories.)

