If the New Yorker cover is satire, Obama's camp isn't laughing.

I ask only because Monday mornings are a good time for splitting hairs...

Is "funny" even part of the definition of "satire"?

I didn't think it necessarily needed to be funny to still be satire.

 

I subscribe to both The New Yorker and Texas Monthly.

My mail lady once asked me why I'd moved around so much in my life.

 

I'm sure spinning thinks the New Yorker is now the most racist magazine in the history of the US.

 

I've thought about it. But shit, Atlantic Monthly makes itself feel like homework sometimes.

No more so than the New Yorker, mind you, but still... I don't know if I want to try to hack both magazines.

 

I just let my subscription end to The New Yorker about two years ago, the same time I stopped getting most magazines. The only magazines I still get are Esquire and Rolling Stone.

 

I don't think anybody is saying The New Yorker needs to avoid being itself because of how things can be misinterpreted. It's more, I think, an observation of how things, once loosed upon the world, can become wildly distorted and used for political and personal gain.

You said the magazine has about a million readers. The attacks upon Obama that find their way to my in-box start from a single computer, and they circulate damn well because people believe them.

I think you underestimate the number of people who will see this and misinterpret it as a result of someone selfishly wanting them to (but that doesn't mean I necessarily think The New Yorker erred in any way).

 

The publicity over this has already reached the folks who have never once looked at The New Yorker, don't understand or know its politics or editorial platform. I have to believe most will think 'Why can't they leave that poor Barack Obama alone!' and the rest--those who are still looking for Muslim symbols in his necktie patterns--are thinking, 'See, there has to be something to this.'

I'm a New Yorker subscriber, backed up to the Ross Perot campaign, I vote for 'Slightly over the top but fair-game political commentary during a campaign.'

 

Fox News will have this cover on their network. I will bet a months paycheck on that.

So more people than the New Yorker subscribers will see it.

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There are so many other potential drawings to do. Why this?

Why not Obama childishly smoking outside of the football field in Denver?

Why not have him giving a speech with all the newspaper headlines behind him?

A little more thought might have brought a better idea.

 

Boom goes the dynamite.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=&ie=UTF-8&q=obama+%22new+yorker%22&scoring=n