Via the Standard, the amateurish photoshoppery partly spoils the effect but number two could plausibly have been a Barry Blitt first draft. (Bonus irony points for the fact that the source image is a beloved leftist mock-up of Bush as a Talib.) If you missed Jeff Goldstein’s and Karl’s takes on the left’s agony over this, treat yourself now. This from JG:
The irony here — and it is choice, believe me — is that this satire was intended as an attack on the right. But now, because the artist tried to attack the right in a way he believed clever and ironic, he is being attacked by the left — his own tribe! — for launching an attack on the right that those on the right, the left is coming to fear, could use against the Obamas, either out of idiocy or malice.
This position, of course, assumes that those on the right are so stupid or unworldly that they aren’t able to suss out satire directed their way — and this is (deliciously!) the fear of some on the left, one born of their own prejudices. These leftwingers, of course, “get it” themselves, so it is really not the cover itself that angers them. Rather, these would-be pragmatists worry that the illiterate righties who people their fevered dreams might not. And then what?
Presumably the rejected covers should be suppressed on the same theory, as the primitive conservative brain that struggles with satire can hardly be expected to grasp satire of satire. I can’t decide, though, whether by running it the New Yorker is paying the average newsstand passerby a compliment by trusting them to get the joke or whether it’s actually a supreme example of liberal cocooning, following from the premise that no one but a leftist bien pensant would so much as glance at a copy of the magazine and therefore there’s no reason to worry that the cover might be misinterpreted. And even if you are one of the benighted few — not all of whom are Republicans, I hasten to remind you — who are reserving judgment on the rumors about Obama, wouldn’t some of the heavier-handed elements of the image clue you in that there’s humor at work here? A portrait of Osama in the Oval Office? Michelle O with a machine gun slung over her shoulder? If Blitt wanted to make this joke subtle enough that it might plausibly be taken seriously, he could have done so. He didn’t.
Update: Here’s Ryan Lizza, who wrote the New Yorker story on Obama, echoing another point made by Goldstein: Since when does satire have to be vetted to make sure it’s not misunderstood by the lowest common denominator?
Update: A commenter reminds me that Jon Stewart caught flak from HuffPo for the same idiotic reason a few weeks ago.
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