Race Baiting-New Yorker Style

As if Faux News putrid crap, the Tennessee GOP and various right-wing sites hatin' on the Obamas wasn't bad enough, now comes word of this New Yorker magazine cover hitting the newsstands today that's supposed to be satirical, but ain't.

"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," said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. "But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

The magazine tried to CTA and said in a statement the cover "combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are."

"The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover."

Whether it was or not, the GOP is thanking you for giving them the image they'll ride from now until November 4. Satire is one thing. I get satire. I love it and read Mad Magazine as a kid for years. But good satire has an element of truth to it and frankly, the New Yorker Obama cover doesn't pass that test.

That New Yorker cover is every spin line, smear and regurgitated lie that the GOP and their Faux News propaganda arm have come up with to denigrate the Obamas. The fact that they took the unprecedented step and added his wife to the image just adds to the pissivity that I and many African-Americans feel about this cover.

It's also a fact that some of the GOP sheeple out there actually believe in their hive minds the bull that was depicted in this cartoon and will take it as 'evidence' that it's the 'truth'. Shouldn't the CNN debunking of the 'madrassa' lies back in January told you people that your favorite so-called 'news' outlet peddles in propaganda?



But I live in a reality based world with reason, knowledge and double checked facts as one cornerstone of it, not rumor or innuendo that allegedly passes as news. And unlike fundies, I don't turn off my brain when I go to church, either.

In the context of a racially polarized electorate contemplating putting an African-American in the highest political office in the land for the first time in our country's history, and the historical course-changing stakes of this election, the cover was irresponsible as well. One of my fears is that this cover has the potential to possibly do damage to the Obama campaign because it comes from a so-called liberal magazine.

It doesn't matter if the New Yorker wrote a serious article about Senator Obama on the inside of the magazine. The problem is the cover you produced to sell that magazine.