MSM, Obama respond to New Yorker cover cartoon depicting Barack and Michelle as terrorists

The mainstream media and Barack Obama campaign respond to The New Yorker cover cartoon depicting himself and Michelle Obama as terrorists.
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What explanation -- other than everyone at the New Yorker being turned into a Pat Buchanan clone -- can one find for the fact that the best magazine in America has produced the FOX News/Karl Rove poster of the Obama family? If this cover works as "satire" then so did the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Call vicious caricature by it's name. If this was well intended then more fool the editor.

As a former lifelong Republican, as an activist key in the formation of the Religious Right, as a white middle-aged middle-class man who is an avid supporter of Senator Obama, let me explain what went wrong: the editor only knows people like himself. The editor of the magazine should have learned from one of the most famous New Yorker covers of all time: the one that mocked NYC provincialism and portrayed the rest of the country as a footnote to Manhattan.

I happen to have come from a background that was very different from your average New Yorker reader. My parents were fundamentalist missionaries. I know how the "other side" thinks. I WAS the other side (as I explain in my book CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All--Or Almost All--Of It Back).

Editors who live in hermetically sealed rareified echo chambers seem to think that everyone thinks as they do. They don't. The editors of the New Yorker should really get to know the "other" a bit better and hang out less with people like themselves and more with the sorts of unwashed mob they scorn. But even so that might not have helped stop this cover.

More than provincialism was at work here. This cover was a blackface-style racial insult. It is either the work of well intended fools or racists. Note: being cool, educated, ironic, smart, self-aware, progressive and powerful is no excuse and doesn't give anyone a pass.

As a white man cognizant of my country's racial sins, I say that this cover crossed the line. Race is no joke. The cover was a racist slur. LOOK AT IT! Look at the racially exaggerated features. We've had enough parody of black men and women in America to last us about another 1000 years before we need more crap like this. And even if this was intended as satire, the editor should have read the latest brain science and psychology on how repetition of lies stick, even when the lies are being denied (or satirized).

Progressives, Democrats and all those independent voters like me who long to turn the page on the Bush catastrophe -- get a grip! What is a joke to some of you is face value serious to Obama's legion of goofy, misguided and frankly stupid (and sometimes deeply racist) enemies. If Obama loses this election thank the liberals, progressives and Democrats carping about Obama's "mistakes." And thank the smart ass provincial little editors at the New Yorker who squandered a historic opportunity for the sake of a few extra copies sold at the news stand.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/provincial-progressives-t_b_112...
MATTHEWS: You know, the trouble is, to many people, it reminds of a Thomas Nast cartoon of the 19th century, where they showed Irish immigrants as monkeys. You know, you can say on a sophisticated level that everybody gets the joke, but people who see that picture of him in a turban and his wife carrying an AK-47, and a big picture, a loving picture of Osama bin Laden, an American flag burning in the fireplace—I'll bet you any money that the right will be using that as T-shirt material within the next couple weeks...there are a lot of people out there who want to believe he's a Muslim, who want to believe that he's too exotic to vote for, for a lot of ethnic reasons. They prefer to think of guy named Osama bin Laden—not Osama...Barack Obama, with the middle name Hussein, as a Muslim, as someone exotic and un-American. It's useful to them to have this kind of art.

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[RoyalDemonforChrist]

he did go to a muslim school tho.

[flargtard]

lol democrats undermining the 1st amendment

[skudaarkaat1]

He IS a muslim and his bitch HATES the United States! The truth hurts, doesn't it!!

[imaginarythings]

Remember "The People versus Larry Flint"? Also, the liberal media was neglecting Very Important issues about Obama while preaching to all of the world about how much Gov. Palin was spending on a dress. I don't really think she was putting our nation and its descendants in debt forever like obama did with his stimulus plan. I think the The liberals and liberal media have given us all adequate proof that thae are either short-sighted and ignorant or.......they are traitors.

[guitarlord2012]

Lol butt sore republicans. :)

[SpringChatty]

@guitarlord2012

the cartoon is acftually "freedom of expression" and its cute, so ??

[SpringChatty]

lol, I think its funny.

[FWYGINOND]

No matter how offensive it is is should still be allowed to be printed. Do you think MSNBC would be throwing a fit if it was a cartoon making George Bush out to look like a money? Wait, many cartoonists DID do that and MSNBC did NOTHING!!!!!

[FWYGINOND]

In "The Audacity of Hope" he said that he went to an Islamic school in Indonesia, so I'm kinda thinking that MSNBC is the one that's wrong.

[bashie34]

JEWS IN CONGRESS ARE STRONGER THAN THE JEWS WHO RUN NEW YORKER PLAIN AND SIMPLE. The new yorker is mad that OBOMA WAS GOING TO BE THE PRESIDENT.

[joygarner]

The image if Obama was taken from a REAL photo of him. Hey, why so sensitive?

So now our 1st amendment is conditioned on somebody's arbitrary idea of what constitutes "valuable information".

Ewe.

[guitarlord2012]

Yes... "Freedom of speech." But that was very offensive.. if you can't see that than I am very sorry for how ignorant you are.