This shouldn’t even need explaining. But evidently, The New Yorker, which prides itself on its sophistication and wit, needs to have it broken down. Here goes: You idiots! What are you thinking?
An illustration by Barry Blitt depicts Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office, revealing their “true” selves: Michelle is in full revolutionary garb, an enormous afro making her look like a millennial Angela Davis, holding an automatic weapon and wearing military pants.
In the cartoon Michelle is giving dap, or fist-bumping, with her husband who is wearing a turban and is dressed in garb perhaps more appropriate for a madrassa in Lahore than the Oval Office.
A painting of Osama bin Laden hangs above the fireplace, where the American flag is being burned.
Could John McCain have commissioned anything that would help him more? I don’t think so. And saying they are just illustrating ignorance doesn’t let them off. It’s actually the problem.
Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal — no matter how superior they feel their intellect is — should assume that just because they’re mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won’t feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It’s a recruitment poster for the right-wing…
But I would assume over at the Conde Nast building, they think it’s droll.
If this is what the so-called liberal media produces, God save us from the right-wing.
Update: Comment from my friend Cathy, who is a New Yorker subscriber: “Do they need to hype circulation that bad? It’s the worst possible taste…not satire. What about Michelle and Barack sitting by the side of the road in dew-rags eating watermelon….would that just be satire???”
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Proposed follow-up cover: Barry Obama chases after a white woman while Michelle pursues him wearing a do-rag and brandishing a rolling pin.
Oh, that Fox News, what a bunch of crazy guys! You can’t blame Fox News for such a crazy…wait…the New Yorker…The New Fucking Yorker? WTF?!
I wonder how much money the New Yorker was paid by the Republican National Committee? McCain must be doing his Happy Dance!
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Gosh! What a horrible surprise … !
A corporately owned East Coast elite establishment magazine, that endorsed Kerry in 2004, edited by a liberal Jewish journalist, puts out a cover ironifying candidate Obama in some sort of British-type attempt to stay … relevant.
Who EVER could have GUESSED that Obama could be so polarizing that even formerly perceived-to-be-liberal magazines like the New Yorker would go all ironical and cartoon-like and conspiratorial on him like that.
Damn the New Yorker! The one-note, paranoid US voters will NEVER understand or believe it could possibly just be all some kind of preposterous JOKE! Who ever could have DREAMED that Obama would inspire this sort of controversy?
(yeah, I know, only a Hillary Clinton supporter; blame it on the Clintons.)
Besides lacking context and a Stupid title …
We live in a nation where folks don’t know Thomas Jefferson from George Jefferson . . .
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Everyone saying that the New Yorker Magazine is liberal is hogwash. You don’t have a cover like this and support Senator Obama. You are right, it is a right wing hit job of the worst kind. Playing up the lies that are going from ear to ear and site to site and e-mail to e-mail about Obama. I hate the New Yorker Magazine.