New 'Ironic' New Yorker Cover Depicting Conspiracists' Nightmare of Real Obamas

Jake Tapper, Political Punch: The sophisticates at The New Yorker have come up with a cover that is sure to get the magazine a lot of attention. Negative attention. From their friends.

An illustration by Barry Blitt depicts Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and his wife Michelle in the Oval Office, revealing their "true" selves: Michelle is in full revolutionary garb, an enormous afro making her look like a millennial Angela Davis, holding an automatic weapon and wearing military pants.

In the cartoon Michelle is giving dap, or fist-bumping, with her husband who is wearing a turban and is dressed in garb perhaps more appropriate for a madrassa in Lahore than the Oval Office.

A painting of Osama bin Laden hangs above the fireplace, where the American flag is being burned. ...

Said Obama [spokesman], Bill Burton:

"The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

Knowing the liberal politics of the magazine, I believe the magazine's staff when they say the illustration is meant ironically, as a parody of the caricature some conservatives (and some supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.) are painting of the Obamas.

But it's still fairly incendiary, at least as these things go. I wonder what the reaction would be were it the Weekly Standard or the National Review putting such an illustration on their covers.

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. ...

LSB: Hilarious! I can't wait until the magazine turns its artists loose on McCain. Won't it be funny to see John and Cindy in their adulterous boudoir, with Cindy popping the pills she stole from her charity, and the senator giving the starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys (his favorite football team - at least while he's in Dallas) to the North Vietnamese, and all the while McCain's first family is on the other side of the door? What a riot! And surely the Radical Right can’t have a problem with that kind of image - it's just satire afterall. Sheesh! Obama not only has to run against McCain, but the media as well.