I completely disagree with Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune when he writes:

The New Yorker maintains that the illustration on the cover of its current issue is meant to satirize, not spread, the smears and rumors about Sen. Barack Obama — that he is an unpatriotic Muslim with terrorist sympathies who hates the American flag..

I take the editors at their word and await the upcoming cover in which they give the same ha-ha-isn’t-it-silly? treatment to the rotten things people say about John McCain: Say a cartoon showing him looking about 150 years old and spouting demented non-sequiturs in the middle of a violent temper tantrum while, in the corner, his wife is passed out next to a bottle of pills.

It’s only satire, right?

No, not really.

See, John McCain isn’t just rumored to be seventy-some-years old, we have actual facts to support the asssertion that he is really old. Therefore, drawing him so that he looks old wouldn’t have anything to with a smear or a rumor. It would have to with what is known as a “fact.” It’s a fact we can actually measure based on the number of times the earth oribits the sun, which we have conveniently labeled “years.” Similarly, it isn’t just a rumor that McCain has angry outbursts or that his wife has been addicted to drugs. Those are facts. Yes, rarely reported facts, but facts nonetheless.

So why would we be equating facts about McCain with lies about Obama? Why would drawing a picture of an old man so that he looks like an old man be in any way equivalent to drawing a non-terrorist so that he looks like a terrorist?

There’s something ridiculous about our political discourse here, when telling basic facts about one candidate (his age) is viewed as soemhow the equivalent of telling complete lies about another (he’s a terrorist!) .

But back to the New Yorker cover. I’ve got sympathies for the artist because he has a difficult task here. In order to satirize something, you’ve got to take it over the top. This New Yorker cover merely repeats the smears and rumors about Sen. Barack Obama, and therefore it is indistinguishable from something you’d see from a right wing magazine. As Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review points out, “What I find interesting about the New Yorker cover is that it’s almost exactly the sort of cover you could expect to find on the front of National Review.” Granted when you’re dealing with right wing crazies it’s pretty difficult to out do them. You could try to draw a cartoon of Obama crashing a jet into the White House while eating babies and showing an in-flight movie where he and Rick
Santorum star in a bestiality porn film with an endangered species of sea turtle, but you’d probably just be disappointed when you found that is the topic of next week’s edition of CNN anchor Glenn Beck’s radio show.