Education Talk

leonard78sp@primus.ca · Guest

Satire Backfire
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Campaign '08:
The New Yorker magazine thought it was doing Barak
Obama a favour with its over-the-top right-wing caricature
of the candidate. But the liberal publication
underestimated his self-absorption.

The unrestrained absurdity of the cartoon that graces the
New Yorker's latest cover has to be seen to be believed.
There's the soon-to-be nominated Sen. Barak Obama,
dressed in Islamic garb in the Oval Office, Old Glory
engulfed in flames in the fireplace and the portrait of
George Washington on the wall above replaced by that of
Osama bin Laden. The new president knuckle-bumps the
new first lady, who sports a full Angela Davis afro,
fatigues and an AK-47.

The accompanying cover story is just the kind of paean to
Obama one would expect from that particular magazine,
arguing that he is not "some sort of anti-establishment
revolutionary" and even "genuinely deferential to core
philosophical insights of the right."

But instead of gratitude from the Obama camp, came the
charge that the cover was "tasteless and offensive."

Editor David Remnick told ABC News the publication
was trying "to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and
rumours and misconceptions about the Obamas that have
been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected
in public opinion polls."

Satire, Remnick argued, "is meant to bring things out into
the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful and
the absurd."

So why can't Sen. Obama lighten up and join in the
chuckling that the cartoon is intended to invoke? Maybe
because, once again, a nerve has been touched.

In May, the senator got very touchy after President Bush
warned the Israeli Knesset of those who "seem to believe
that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals,
as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they
have been wrong all along."

We wondered then if Obama, to quote Hamlet, "doth
protest too much" ‹ pleading innocence when actually
guilty.

Does the New Yorker's wild stereotype serve as simply
too strong a reminder that this is a presidential candidate
who has said he will hold summits with the heads of
terrorist states without any preconditions? Does it play up
too strongly his radical background as a Chicago
community organizer?

Or did it simply bruise his ego? Instead of the current
Rolling Stone cover photo of the candidate ‹ emanating
every positive attribute you can think of: nice,
distinguished, patriotic (he sports a flag pin), humble ‹
the New Yorker opted for the provocative.

For Obama's people, however, what it provoked was not
mirth. After all, this is one politician so aware of his
oratorical abilities that he once "joked" to a New
Hampshire crowd that "a beam of light will come down
upon you, you will experience an epiphany . . . and you
will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and
vote for Obama."

[ Note that "Hampshire" is a breed of pig,
as well as an English county]

At any rate, it's not an image that the Obama campaign
wants voters to have in their minds on Election Day.

Bob LeChevalier · Guest

"leonard78sp@primus.ca" <leonard78sp@primus.ca> wrote: