you put me in the uncomfortable position of having no other recourse but to impugn your and your wife's intelligence. as a fellow fan of callaloo soup, i just won't do that, so i guess we're gonna have to agree to disagree.

Nevertheless, perhaps you should learn how to use hyphens before you cast aspersions (maybe nasturtiums) on the 600+ whose imbecility you choose to scorn. Your own comments are so cogent that, like James Bond's martini, I'm shaken but not stirred.

The New Yorker engineers a publicity-stunt "controversy," liberals get mad, and it's George Bush's fault?

Hastily-written screed with an awful premise and some class envy thrown in gets posted on Salon and 600+ idiots melt down in the comments section?

God, I love the internet.

When I first saw “The Cartoon” I broke out in an ear to ear full tooth smile. Finally! Finally someone “got it.” By taking all the rumors, innuendos, accusations, etc. and overlaying them onto pleasant, light hearted, complimentary images of the Obamas, the picture told it all….in a glance. You’ll note that their facial features are pleasing, not vicious, angry, blood dripping from their gums. Almost like an in-house private joke, they seem to be laughing and saying, “they want Obama, the Terrorist? Here I am. LOL.”

Barack Obama missed a golden opportunity. I thought, with his education and urban sophistication, he would have answered the reporters with something like this: “You know, Jack/Jane, when I first saw the cartoon, I spit up my breakfast orange juice. I yelled out, Michelle, baby, come'ere, you’ve GOT to see this! Barry Blitt is a genius and if it takes a cartoon to put all this crap into perspective, than I have a great debt of gratitude to bestow on Mr. Blitt.”

These words are attributed to Voltaire, the embodiment of the l8th century "Enlightenment". Perhaps he understood the importance of a free press and freedom of speech more clearly than some of those posting responses to Gary Kamiya's article. Little pieces of actuality are being chipped away in some of the letters castigating The New Yorker. For instance, how does "I have no response to that" indicate clear exasperation? A spontaneous AND exasperated response would be "I'm sick and tired of these rumours. I'll prove them wrong and, in the meanwhile, all I can say is that The New Yorker is one of my favourite reads. You've probably misunderstood what they intended to convey. It's a magazine for pointy-heads, not for reporters".

This reads like a bad attempt at channeling Christopher Hitchens.

Steve_D wrote:

The Obama cover shows somebody else's point of view on the underlying truth. And there's no framing device, visually or in text, to make that clear.

Exactly so, it occurs in a vacuum. All this kerfuffle that it is obvious is nonsense, it is not. One has to make decided leaps to arrive at that association (e.g. to R-bumpkins).

And note, I have been writing these comments not even as an Obama supporter, since my past comments have made it abundantly clear I am not.

The sooner 'New Yorker' pseudo-satire fans embrace the truth and cease their absurd apologias, the sooner we can all move on and agree this "satire" is simply not what it is purported to be.

Footnote: My wife even asked two New Yorker subscribers she knew what they thought (at a concert she went to last night) and they both agreed it left them cold and was NOT funny!

Case closed.

The First Amendment gives the New Yorker the right to publish it, and it gives me the right to think it is not funny. The First Amendment gives people the right to boycott as protected speech, too.

How ironic that people claiming to be against censorship are trying to censor criticism of a bad attempt at satire. How truly ironic that the censors of the criticism try to use semi-intellectual bullying to censor.

“Does anyone actually believe that the New Yorker ran this cover to make a wry, ironic, counterculture point to the "in-the-know" urbane and witty crowd? HAH!” – AncientAssyrian

Speaking for myself, NO…,

But then, they also knew that they those who view themselves as especially literate and “in-the-know” would defend their erudite and “intellectually subtle” editorial decision while chortling condescendingly and smugly at the reaction of the smelly rabble on both ends of the political spectrum.

It’s interesting to learn who some in the pathetic and delusional constituency of these often self-defined “in-the-know” groups turn out to be. The need to self-identify in those groups sometimes overwhelms more compelling and, perhaps, more worthy considerations in any given controversy.

Kinda reminds you of the high school “Cool Crowd” syndrome.

That particular phenomenon in the behavior of adults is worthy of an entirely different subject for discussion.

Do you believe that Obama and his wife sat thru 20 years of Wrights preachings and not have heard one word.

What church do they belong to now?

99% of the time, political satire work by showing us the author/cartoonist's view of the underlying truth of things. If George Bush is drawn as a vampire sucking blood out of the Statue of Liberty, we're bound to leap to the conclusion that: the author is stating that Bush is somehow draining the nation's life-blood of liberty. If Bush is drawn as a dude-ranch style cowboy, we're bound to think: the author is making some kind of statement about Bush putting on macho airs. If Bush is drawn in a dunce cap, sitting in a corner, reading a book upside down, we're bound to think: the author regards Bush as a not particularly bright student of the world. I'd bet that the vast bulk of NEW YORKER covers and political cartoons follow this underlying model.

The Obama cover shows somebody else's point of view on the underlying truth. And there's no framing device, visually or in text, to make that clear. (Typically, when you're mocking a political enemy's take on the situation, you're supposed to exaggerate his point of view to the level of absurdity. That might be the intent, here, but it falls far short of the mark.)

On first glance, we think: the author of this image wants us to contemplate how Obama is like a secret flag-burning terrorist, gleefully celebrating the con he's pulled on America with his radical wife. In fact, the very same image could be put on an openly racist, far right magazine to accompany an article entitled: "Obama: Secret Flag Burning Terrorist & His Radical America Hating Wife -- The Truth the Librul Media Don't Want You to Know." In fact, if that magazine title was lying on a table in the foreground, the intent and purpose of this cartoon would be a whole hell of a lot clearer. Instead, the New Yorker has handed the right a propaganda tool that they couldn't have created themselves without being called paranoid racists.

Obama's exasperation with this situation is clear. Again and again, the so-called "liberal" media are the worst enemies of liberal politicians.

This isn't about the left having no sense of humor; it's about the fact that it isn't funny. It's about the fact that the media are propagating the Obama-as-terrorist-meme even while they're pretending to discredit it. (After all, it's sensationalist -- it grabs headlines.) It's about the fact that this image is freighted with a muddled, garbled message that demands an "ironic" interpretation quite at odds with the way political satire (including covers of THE NEW YORKER) normally works.