The New Yorker: When irony fails

“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor, and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle,” said James Rainey in the Los Angeles

Times, “so why not eliminate humor, too?” That seems to be the aim of legions of “Internet blatherers,” to say nothing of both presidential

campaigns, who are voicing outrage over this week’s New Yorker magazine cover, which depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as if every absurd smear they have endured were true. Situated in the Oval Office, Barack is decked out in Muslim garb as he fist-bumps his wife, who sports a giant Afro and an AK-47. A portrait of Osama bin Laden hangs above the fireplace, in which an American flag is burning. Now, it’s pretty apparent to most intelligent people—certainly to “the majority of readers of one of America’s finest magazines”—that the drawing is a parody. And the butt of the humor, clearly, is not the Obamas but the “knuckle-walkers” who are “trying to turn a couple of fresh-scrubbed

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Harvard Law grads into something foreign and scary.”

Yes, it’s satire, said Jonathan Alter in Newsweek.com, but that misses the larger point. As any political operative will tell you, “negative images burn their way into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by facts.” The cartoon image of the Obamas “now being endlessly displayed on cable TV” may have been meant to

target all that “dopey Internet rumormongering.” But for some voters,

sadly, it will only serve to reinforce those rumors. Republicans have been working overtime to “gin up the fear factor” against Obama, said John Nichols in The Nation. “But who would have thought they’d get an

assist from the most elitely liberal of elite liberal journals?”

The New Yorker cover is indeed “a tasteless and offensive attack,” said Mark Hemingway in National Review Online—“on conservatives.” Think about it: The New Yorker is suggesting that this absurd caricature of Obama represents the heart of why right-wingers think he’s unfit to

be president. It’s not legitimate, in other words, to object to Obama’s lack of experience, his flipflops, or his long refusal to wear an American

flag pin. Nor should anyone care about his associations with radicals such as former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and the ranting

Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Nope: If you’re “a smartypants editor” in Manhattan, these, apparently, are concerns only for bigoted, narrow-minded “trailer-dwelling backwoodsmen in West Pennsyltucky.”