Rush Limbaugh was right (Salon Magazine)

[zippy890]

The blogosphere's reaction to the New Yorker cover proves that the Bush era has killed a lot of liberals' sense of humor. And that's not funny.

By Gary Kamiya

July 15, 2008 | It's official: The Bush era has made liberals so terrified of right-wing smears it has caused them to completely lose their sense of humor.

Much as I hate to repeat one of Rush Limbaugh's flat, stale and unprofitable applause lines, that's the only conclusion I can draw after witnessing the left-wing blogosphere's bizarre reaction to the New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office as a dishdasha-clad Muslim terrorist, exchanging a "terrorist fist jab" with Michelle Obama, who is dressed like a latter-day Angela Davis with huge 'fro, combat boots, assault rifle and bandolier of bullets -- while Osama bin Laden looks approvingly on from a picture frame and an American flag burns merrily in the presidential fireplace. To judge from the reaction of much of the left, you'd think that New Yorker editor David Remnick had morphed into some kind of hideous hybrid of Roger Ailes and Roland Barthes and was waging an insidious Semiotic War against Obama.

I don't know what lugubrious planet these people are on, but I definitely don't want any of them writing material for Jon Stewart.

After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that "irony was dead." Seven years later, they've been proven right -- but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity -- it's been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

more at

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/07/15/new_yorker_cartoon/

[Larkspur]

1. I love Jon Stewart but the New Yorker cover was not satire

At best it was a lame attempt at satire. It should have had Limbaugh and Faux News painting a portrait of the Obamas as unAmerican to voters with another slide showing the real Obamas or real America -- am melting pot of many races and ethnic groups.

[screembloodymurder]

2. Satire:

"A literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn"

Sorry, but the cover doesn't work because the parties it presumes to ridicule are not in the picture. This leaves the interpretation up to the reader. It takes guts to ridicule power and the New Yorker didn't have the guts to make a unequivocally satirical statement.

[Doctor_J]

4. As I wrote yesterday, a satirical cover would've had a prototype Didiot

dreaming of or watching on TV the image in the actual cover

[bemildred]

3. Boy, the defensive babble coming from the MSM is something to watch.

All sorts of sophisticated variations of "we were just kidding", as though racist and ethnic stereotypes were OK and not subject to criticism, if you claim to have been joking.

[ismnotwasm]

5. It wasn't funny

I have a great sense of humor. It just wasn't funny. I think some are trying way too hard to define irony, satire or humor for others.

Now, funny is Bush and Co. spending the rest of their lives in Gitmo. I'd laugh my ass off.