This is something you might expect from a hard right slime squad, but not from the supposedly liberal New Yorker. It shows Obama in the Oval Office in Muslim garb with his wife as an AK-totin’ radical with a picture of bin Laden above the fireplace with the flag burning in it.
I’m speechless. What were they thinking?
[The Obama] campaign issued a statement by Bill Burton which Mike Allen of Politico.com reported as, “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”
McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive.”
We look forward to future satirical New Yorker covers. Perhaps they could portray Obama as Stepin Fetchit or as a murderous Communist or, hey how about this laff riot, being lynched by a white mob. All in good satirical jest of course. Right.
Maybe they were thinking that it would be obvious that they were making fun of the right-wing’s paranoid fantasies about the Obamas. It was obvious to me. Get a grip. How did it get to the point where virtually every statement about or by a political candidate that someone (of any political stripe) makes is “outrageous” or “offensive”? The fact that you can’t (or won’t) understand the point of this cover–specifically that the butt of the joke is the right wing–is pathetic.
I doubt the right wing notices it’s being lampooned– I bet they feel a sense of validation.
Let them know what you think:
themail@newyorker.com
fiction@newyorker.com,
talkofthetown@newyorker.com,
shouts@newyorker.com,
poetry@newyorker.com,
newsbreaks@newyorker.com,
captioncontest@newyorker.com,
subscriptions@newyorker.com,
maria_tenaglia@newyorker.com,
Larissa_MacFarquhar@newyorker.com,
Lawrence_Wright@newyorker.com,
reddicious@newyorker.com,
jacob_lewis@newyorker.com,
david_remnick@newyorker.com,
terese_cunningham@newyorker.com,
anita_raokeech@newyorker.com,
norman_miller@newyorker.com,
melissa_smith@newyorker.com,
connor_o’gara@newyorker.com,
marii_sebahar@newyorker.com,
ed_amstutz@newyorker.com,
cookman_campbell@newyorker.com,
patti_chapman@newyorker.com
DJ on 14 Jul 2008 at 7:20 am #
I doubt the right wing notices it’s being lampooned– I bet they feel a sense of validation.
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Who cares what they think? They are going to hate Obama no matter what. The New Yorker’s readership (and I include myself) are people who realize (I hope) that this cover is a mockery of those guys.
Jeez. It’s a cartoon. If you don’t like it, don’t read the New Yorker. This tempest in a teapot makes Obama and his supporters (and I am one) look thin-skinned and fretful.
“Who cares what they think?”
Yeah, that’s what they say about you, too. It’s called polarization, and it appears that the New Yorker is promoting it.
“If you don’t like it, don’t read the New Yorker.”
I don’t. And I’m less likely to than ever.