By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
The New Yorker magazine has struck again. Its latest illustrated cover -- showing Barack Obama in Muslim garb and wife Michelle carrying a machine gun in the Oval Office -- is highly offensive. But it's right on target as a right-wing caricature of the couple.
I've read the magazine off and on since the 1960s, and its covers have often been out of bounds. Naked women. Politicians as con men. And so on.
But don't let this week's cover detract from what's written inside the magazine.
Writer Ryan Lizza eloquently demolishes Obama's oft-stated contention that he's a change agent.
"...He has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist," Lizza writes. "He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game."
The cover is satirical and will receive most of the attention.
The article is a detail-filled piece on Obama's political skills and should get the most attention.
Delicious
Digg
Oh Satire!
No one likes you anymore ... how sad.
http://lifeisacookie.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/elitist-pol-lambastes-elitist-mags-lampoon/
Keep it in Perspective
The New Yorker magazine cover is certainly edgy but not ground breaking. I would recommend that everybody, who is shocked by it, visit the Truman Library Museum and look at some of the cartoons and magazine covers which were printed about politicians from an earlier age. Those cartoonists and writers were much more vile and unrestrained than anything we see today. FDR was a master at deflecting these kinds of personal attacks, with humor and aplomb. His famous "Fala" speech was a classic reponse to a personal attack from the GOP which turned the tables on his critics. Senator Obama does not have the communication skills and self-confidence of an FDR, few do. However, he cannot exhibit such thin skin that he reacts with ire to every slur, or he will become the target for everybody with access to a printing press. He should have learned by now that: "Politics ain't beanbag."