Liberal Left Apoplectic About the New Yorker Cover

It's really quite funny to read the teeth-gnashing going on on the pro-Obama left over the now infamous New Yorker cover (repeated below for your viewing pleasure).

What is the left's biggest fear about this cover? They fear that you rubes in flyover country won't get the joke. You'll see the cover and it will only reinforce the worst of the Obama email rumor stereotypes. Here are some examples of the agony of the left. First, from Jonathan Alter in Newsweek:

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he told potential investors that it was not edited for "the little old lady from Dubuque."

This is still true, as the flap over the latest cover suggests. Publishing an illustration of Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim fist-bumping his wife Michelle (with a semi-automatic over her shoulder) may have been meant as a parody of the dopey Internet rumor-mongering that has dogged the campaign for close to two years.

But it is indisputably harmful to the Obama campaign, which is why, though Obama himself wouldn't comment, his spokesman called the cartoon "tasteless and offensive." ...

In the same way, the New Yorker cover, now being displayed endlessly on cable TV, speaks louder than any efforts by Obama supporters to stop the smears (though it doesn't help that barackobama.com makes it hard to navigate to the truth-squading). As the author Drew Weston has shown, negative images burn their way into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by facts. With one visual move, the magazine undid months of pro-Obama coverage in its pages.

Alter then goes on to provide a lengthy refutation of various Obama internet rumors, and while he's at it, manages to plant one of his own about McCain. Just look at this passage:

For a while, I thought only rightwingers and other Obama haters bought into the lies being spread about him. Then I got a call from Ross Perot, who was trying to plant some dirt about John McCain leaving live POWs behind in Vietnam (untrue, by the way). In the course of the conversation, it became clear that Perot thought Obama was a Muslim. When I informed him that Obama was actually a Christian, Perot was relieved. He didn't hate Obama; he just had an instinct to believe whatever he happened to see online over what he read in reputable newspapers.

What purpose was served by including the dirt that Perot was trying to plant? Couldn't he have just as easily mentioned a phone call from Perot without spreading the rumor? His little aside about the story being untrue doesn't undo the fact that he decided to play the tool of Perot in spreading a false story, while at the same time criticising those on the right who have done the same.

And from the collection of wackos known as DailyKos comes this:

Michael Shaw is "a Clinical Psychologist; an analyst of visual journalism; an interpreter of political images; and publisher of the political blog BAGnewsNotes." Yesterday he offered some insight on why the latest New Yorker cover landed with such a clunk, including: "To give us an appreciation, or a sense of outrage, or even a poke at any truth this picture might contain...the illustration has to take us outside or beyond the manifest content here, and then show it to us again through a different window---be that a different context or a different point of view."

As it happens, the New Yorker kerfuffle comes at an opportune time for Shaw:
In my "ObamaPhobia" presentation at Netroots Nation next Saturday, I aim to show how various campaign images in the traditional media echo more extreme right-wing hate imagery---conveying Obama as a man with a covert, anti-American agenda, or a deliberate and calculated mastermind, or a closet Muslim and Islamic Manchurian candidate. In hitting the trifecta here, many will argue this illustration is simply a satiric representation of the sophomoric attacks being tossed at Obama from far right field.

If that's all there was to it, though, than why do I sense Rove is chortling tonight?

In the meantime, I keep revisiting the cover and asking myself, 'Why aren’t I hearing rimshots in my head? Why is there nothing on the page that feels like a trigger for a punchline? How come it doesn't say to me, In yer FACE, smear merchants?'

And they're worried about us not getting the joke.

Jack Shafer at Slate gets it right:

Although every critic of the New Yorker understood the simple satire of the cover, the most fretful of them worried that the illustration would be misread by the ignorant masses who don't subscribe to the magazine. Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm wrote, "That's the problem with satire. A lot of people won't get the joke. Or won't want to. And will use it for non-humorous purposes, which isn't the New Yorker's fault." Malcolm continues in this vein, calling it a "problem" that "there's no caption on the cover to ensure that everyone" will understand the punch line.

Here's ABC News' Jake Tapper singing the harmony line:

Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal—no matter how superior they feel their intellect is—should assume that just because they're mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won't feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It's a recruitment poster for the right-wing.

Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers, but that appears to be what The New Yorker's detractors desire. I don't know whether to be crushed by that realization or elated by the notion that one of the most elite journals in the land has faith that Joe Sixpack can figure out a damned picture for himself.

How did we arrive at the point where a simple wisecrack like Blitt's causes such a hullabaloo? Has the public's taste for barbed drawings waned since the Paul Conrad, Herblock, Pat Oliphant, and Bill Mauldin heydays, or have the voices of the would-be bowdlerizers gotten stronger? Shall we don blinders and erect barriers so nobody is offended or misled?

Only weak thinkers fear strong images. The publication that convenes itself as a polite dinner party, serving only strained polenta and pureed peas, need not invite me to sup.

The New Yorker should have known better than to try and be funny, especially about Obama, because to the surprise of the New Yorker and other lefties the only ones getting the joke are those rubes in flyover country.