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Let's talk about appropriation for a moment. We've all probably heard of the term Cultural Appropriation before, it's in itself probably a meme at this point. "The adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture" is often the definition used and usually what people mean by it is white people taking stuff from minorities because they're meanies.

But, what is a culture? A culture, by the dictionary definition, is "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively". Now, all that means is that things used by a group of people who have similar outlooks or beliefs to express themselves together. Sub-Cultures, the cultures that form between hundreds or thosuands of people rather then millions of people, and are often much less serious then that of races or religions, are still cultures.

So let's talk a moment about a trend that goes on, that is politics using "memes" to spread their messages. Now, memes are believe it or not, a part of culture. They make up a quick and easy way for people to convey ideas to one another, usually for a comedic purpose but sometimes more then that. Regardless, memes played a role in the election last year, and now one group of people are looking to use them against the other, and are using unrelated memes to do so.

Do you think this counts as a form of Appropriation, in that it takes what was a more or less neutral joke and makes it decidedly slanted towards one political party, and pointedly aimed at another?

Do you think that by giving these memes or jokes a political bias or connotation, that it is depriving the joke or meme of its original intended purpose, that being to make others laugh or to be used as a relatively harmless or neutral statement?

I don't think it counts as appropriation. This might surprise you guys but I am highly skeptical of the concept of "cultural appropriation" and think the term is badly misused by many people.

Cullture is shared and it spreads virally much like memes themselves, OP's assessment is correct. Culture is shared and transitive, always evolving. It moves between different groups and across demographics.

As for OP's question, I dislike politics and memes being combined and I also dislike corporations using memes to get themselves over with potential customers, but I cannot deny that it is their right to do so. I do not own a funny cat image or Success Kid (A mobile phone company used Success Kid in UK adverts a few years ago). A company or politician has the right to use it provided they aren't slapping a big ol' TM ALL RIGHTS RESERVED on something the Internet created.

EDIT Adding image and link to Success Kid

Yeah kinda sucks how it's being used for corporate purposes, but hey, they used the meme right and they don't seem to have stopped other people posting their own edits online.

There is a way in which "cultural appropriation is real" but I think of it as applying when elements of a culture are "dumbed down" or simplified because suits believe their own audience to be too stupid to understand foreign ideas. This is a trivial example, but take Pokémon and the whole "jelly donuts" thing from the translated version of that show. It's truly very silly to assume that children will not understand that other countries may have different snacks/food with which they are not familiar. In short that serves as an example of American grownups thinking American children are idiots. American kids can't understand the concept of "rice balls"? Really? Pretty disappointing and kind of cynical, wouldn't you say? ;)

tl;dr I don't like it but don't really have the right to stop it.

While memes may start out with a completely different joke in mind, what I like about a fuckton of memes is applicability, especially in politics.

A Political meme could start off being made by the alt right, but than people could use it to make fun of the alt right[take counter signal memes for example. most of the ones I made are still p anti-islam but I don't think a lot of the more anti-semetic alt-rightists would agree with my rather staunch Pro-Israel opinions or at least the fact that Muslims did 9/11] or even the other way around [a left-leaning meme, such as "This is the future liberals want" could instead be changed to "conservatives" and simply make fun of SJW paranoia towards the Trump Admininstration or other things.]