Please do yourselves a favor and cruise message boards in major newspapers and news web sites like the one posted by Susan Wood. Comments like the ones she posted are the norm. It's not all GOP trolls. It's our fellow citizens, who lack the critical thinking skills of invertebrates.

One of the most depressing aspects of this election cycle is that it's the first to take place in the era of public participation in news such that instant unfiltered feedback from the electorate is available. It's an instant focus group, and sadly, we are surrounded by idiots. Susan's selections actually had decent grammar and spelling, unlike most of the ignorant, hate-filled, utterly asinine posts you can regularly read on places like Topix. If these people really are just trollers pretending to be ignorant illogical schmucks, they're amazing character writers. And they're prolific.

Their messages confirm that they do not see the cover as satire. After all, to appreciate the satire, you have to know the personality of the New Yorker. Do you think the kind of people who write these messages know that the New Yorker is a lefty intelligentsia rag? Don't they need to know that to get that the New Yorker is just kidding?

So yes, I do believe that many people do not understand that it's satire. And I do believe that the New Yorker may have added to rather than taken from the misconceptions held by a large number of our fellow Americans. Hopefully it's such a blowout by then that it doesn't matter.

that 95% of voters are not paying one iota of attention to this stuff during summer vacation. By making these mistakes early when nobody but political junkies are watching, McCain is affording himself the opportunity to polish up before the campaign hits front and center. Of course whether he's capable of polishing up is an entirely different story - he's been making these gaffes for months, and he's still making them.

I wonder how many bottles of Tums and Maalox McCain's team plows through on a weekly basis?

I have to imagine it's just a matter of time until McCain copies Hillary's last-ditch effort and pulls out the race card. McCain's doing a decent job now of sticking to his guns and sticking to the issues, but he's getting creamed on them, mostly due to his own ineptitude (he practically handed Obama this media feeding frenzy on a silver platter via his Iraq "challenge"). His only hope is to convince enough drooling morons (which are plentiful in this great land) that it's too dangerous to elect the black Muslim with the funny sounding name.

We have the most charismatic, intelligent, inspiring political candidate in recent memory running against one of the most acerbic, truculent, demented political candidates in recent memory, who also happens to share the party label and viewpoints of an administration with a 28% approval rating, the lowest since it's been measured.

And it's close.

How is this even remotely possible? In what bizzarro universe do we reside?

It's just such a helpless yet utterly infuriating feeling.

It's about an ideology versus a person. I don't think nearly as many people are voting for McCain as are those voting against Obama. I seriously can't recall reading a single article, blog posting, or even comment making the case for McCain. It's all about Obama - whether you're for him or against him.

Obama is under a far more powerful microscope than McCain. McCain could punch a waitress and I doubt many people would take notice. Meanwhile, every breath Obama takes, every move he makes, every smile he fakes, every vow he breaks ... and we're watching him. That song is about a stalker, and it's fitting because the country is stalking Obama. It's news when he brushes his teeth. Why would this ever sell? Because so many people want to dissect his every move looking for weakness or missteps, and the public gets its red meat from a media all too eager to feed them (our fearless Editor included).

That McCain's an acerbic, truculent old coot doesn't matter much. He could be a Jell-o mold, and people would still be arguing that Obama is too inexperienced or extreme or socialist or elitist or empty to be president. The unifying theme of all of these arguments against Obama is that they're ethereal and very difficult to quantify. There's no way to know what the consequences will be of an Obama presidency, and people as a whole are very resistant to change (especially conservatives, who resist it by definition). Toss in the fact that Obama is black and has a funny sounding name, and people in flyover states, many of whom don't know any black people, start getting very very nervous.

Obama has to convince middle-America that he can be trusted. The best way to do that is anyone's guess.

The problem with trying to convince the type of people Obama needs to convince to vote for him is that they're not the convincing type.

They already have this huge presumption against him, for whatever reason, and as others have noted, everything he says and does is interpreted through the lens of that perception.

The difficulty is that the presumption against Obama is rooted in voters' own insecurities and their own fear and hatred of all that's "different". They're the type of people who just hold on tighter when you try to convince them to let go. Ain't no uppity negro gonna tell them what's what. So the harder he tries, the more he solidifies the resentment.