Controversial New Yorker Cover Featuring 'Unpatriotic' Obamas Draws IreTuesday July 15, 2008
CityNews.ca Staff
Like it or loathe it, the cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker is bound to get your attention.
Splashed across the front of the publication's July 21 issue is a political cartoon depicting Barack Obama and his wife as flag-burning radicals. The Democratic presidential candidate is dressed in Muslim attire while Michelle Obama is clad in camouflage with an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. Titled The Politics of Fear, the illustration by Canadian Barry Blitt is raising eyebrows on both sides of the border.
"It might have been a bad decision. It's the sort of thing that could really backfire on them," opines one person asked on the streets of Toronto who saw the magazine.
Another adds, "I think it's terrible, really insulting and in very bad taste."
The illustration has the Obama camp up in arms, arguing the sketch, which also includes a portrait of what appears to be Osama bin Laden hanging on the wall, is "tasteless and offensive."
The illustration isn't explained in the issue, which contains a story about Obama's early years in Chicago. However in responding to the controversy the magazine contends satire is part of what it's always done. New Yorker editor David Remnick says the cover was not meant to be an attention-getter.
"I can't speak for anyone else's interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama's supposed 'lack of patriotism' or his being 'soft on terrorism' or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers," he maintains. "That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office."
Republican presidential candidate John McCain has also condemned the cover.
The issue won't hit newsstands in Toronto until later this week.
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Wow, ...the desperation of some people is really showing. {sigh} oh well.
"Not meant to be an attention getter" Sha Right!
I think someone's nose is growing right about now.