Obama slams Muslim portrayal

[Woodmonkey]

Barack Obama's campaign is condemning as “tasteless and offensive” a New Yorker magazine cover that depicts Obama in a turban, fist-bumping his gun-slinging wife.

An American flag burns in their fireplace.

The New Yorker says it's satire. It certainly will be candy for cable news.

The Obama campaign quickly condemned the rendering. Spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds quickly e-mailed: “We completely agree with the Obama campaign, it’s tasteless and offensive.”

The issue, which goes on sale Monday, includes a long piece by Ryan Lizza about Obama’s start in Chicago politics.

At a press availability Sunday afternoon in San Diego, Obama was asked, according to a transcript by Maria Gavrilovic of CBS News: “The upcoming issue of The New Yorker, the July 21 issue, has a picture of you, depicting you and your wife on the cover.

“Have you seen it? If not, I can show it to you on my computer. It shows your wife Michelle with an Afro and an AK-47 and the two of you doing the fist bump with you in a sort of turban-type thing on top. I wondered if you’ve seen it or if you want to see it or if you have a response to it?”

Obama, shrugging incredulously, replied: “I have no response to that.”

The magazine explains at the start of its news release previewing the issue: “On the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, in ‘The Politics of Fear,’ artist Barry Blitt satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.”

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post said Sunday on his CNN media show “Reliable Sources” that the cover is arguably “incendiary.”

“I talked to the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, who tells me this is a satire, that they are making fun of all the rumors,” Kurtz added.

Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune defended it as “quite within the normal realms of journalism,” adding that “it's just lampooning all the crazy ignorance out there.”

The panelists agreed it would succeed in its goal of getting attention.

The Source

[las47032]

Bawling their eyes out. Here's some tissues. Cry me a river!

What a bunch of bellyaching pantywaists yammering about the satire is crass and unsavory. It offends their precious exalted leader and deliverer. Obama, his camp and supporters need to hush up and grow a pair.

When Obama was in Jacksonville Florida he told the audience what kind of political campaign they (Republicans) will operate. The Republicans are going to cause voters to be filled with fear or apprehension. WHYN NewsTalk 560 | Springfield's News and Information Leader YouTube - Obama - "They're Going To Make You Afraid Of Me" His prognostication proved him right, the the fearmongers are not Republicans but the New Yorker's Obama satire.

The New Yorker's objective what they consider conservatives making fun of Obama's image. And the lampoon was meant to laugh at the bitter, Bible-thimping, gun-clining bumpkins (Obama's statement Obama Draws Fire for Comments on Small-Town America - America’s Election HQ) opposing to installing a committed leftist in the White House.

Though the New Yorker is mocking Obama, they are attacking conservatives. Yet Obama has takenoffense. He warned the Republicans they would be preoccupied about his race, but it is the Left making ethnicity an issue.

Has the Republicans made any verbal assaults on Obama? Not! The New Yorker paraod is the third attack on Obama. Ralph Nader conducting himself as the authority of black authenticity. YouTube - Ralph Nader: Barack Obama wants to 'talk white' Jesse Jackson's comments about wanting to Jesse Jackson wanting to demasculinize Obama. YouTube - Fox News: Jesse Jackson Threatens to Castrate Obama

Also, MSNBC News Live Andrea Mitchell insult our intelligence, we're too dimwitted, no sophistication comprehend the satire. Andrea Mitchell: Dumb Americans Might Not Get 'Sophisticated' Cartoon | NewsBusters.org

Likewise MSNBC Hardball's Christ Matthews is so troubled about the New Yorker Cover, he dreads the "Wingnuts" or the right wingers will exploit the situation making t shirts. Matthews Worries 'Right' Will Turn New Yorker Cover into T-Shirt | NewsBusters.org

Michelle Malkin's webiste has links about Rolling Stone magazine's cartoon McCain as a POW in a bamboo cage with Hillary, Obama and someother guy poking at McCain. Ted Rall's outrageous prejudice. Jeff Danziger’s Condi Rice cartoon, and slaying President Bush Michelle Malkin Grow a pair, Obama

Where is the outrage about that?!

[Woodmonkey]

Satire is just that and frequently offends the person it's aimed at. It's a time honored tradition in our elections, that and parody.

[Woodmonkey]

Mag satire panned; depicts Obamas as Muslim, terrorist

This week's New Yorker set off a Web-and-cable frenzy Monday over cover art that shows Barack Obama as a Muslim, Michelle Obama as a militant and the American flag aflame under a portrait of Osama bin Laden — all in the Oval Office.

Reactions to the cartoon by artist Barry Blitt ranged from sadness to rage to scorn. The consensus from analysts was "what were they thinking?"

"It's the mass media at its worst. It perpetuates false information, and it's highly inflammatory," says Darrell West, an elections and public opinion expert at the Brookings Institution. "It gives credibility to what's been circulating for months, and that's what makes it dangerous."

POLITICS BLOG: Do you find magazine cover offensive?

In a statement Monday, New Yorker editor David Remnick called the cover a "fantastical" satire that shows "obvious distortions" about the Obamas. Some blacks don't see it that way.

"I wouldn't use the word satire. The word I would use is racist," said Sallie Elliot, 53, of Cincinnati, waiting in that city Monday to hear Obama at the NAACP convention. "It perpetuates narrow, stereotypical images, and it was insulting to me."

George Lockwood, who lectures on newspaper ethics and political caricature at Louisiana State University, said the magazine made "a damn-fool decision." In years overseeing comics at the old Milwaukee Journal, Lockwood says, he learned that "the one thing that most readers don't understand is satire. You do it at some risk."

The problem, says Elaine Miller, a former professor who gives talks on gender and race in political cartoons, is that "once you launch a work of art it belongs to the reader. The artist's intent is very interesting, but the reader owns the interpretation."

That was the fear on liberal blogs Monday, the second day the cartoon cover topped Memeorandum.com — a ranking of political hot topics on the Web. A recent Newsweek poll shows the potential for misinterpretation: 26% said Obama was raised a Muslim, 39% said he attended an Islamic school and 12% said he was sworn in to the Senate on a Quran. None of that is true.

Satire is supposed to exaggerate reality, not reflect it, author Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote at ta-nehisi.com. "Sadly, that picture exaggerates nothing — that's exactly what a slice of Americans believe about Barack Obama. Expect that image to be on T-shirts within two weeks," he wrote.

Christian conservative David Brody made a similar prediction at The Brody File: "Obama's critics on the right think the picture is spot on. I mean, this thing has 'copy and paste' written all over it. Expect to see this … picture popping up in conservative e-mails everywhere."

Obama's campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, criticized the cover as "tasteless and offensive." Obama's fall opponent, Republican John McCain, called it "totally inappropriate" Monday and added, "Frankly, I understand if Sen. Obama and his supporters would find it offensive."

Some conservatives said the cover annoyed them because they were its real targets.

"The cartoon is intended to make fun of conservatives as ignorant racists, and essentially marginalize any criticism of Obama as moronic," wrote Philip Klein at The American Spectator.

Other conservatives mocked Obama at the American Thinker website, under a headline about Obama's "incredibly thin skin."

Rick Moran posted a Der Spiegel cover of President Bush as Rambo, complete with muscle shirt and automatic weapon, and asked, "Isn't it time for Obama to man up?"

The Source

[Bluehawk]

Here's what Salon magazine had to say about this matter. I agree with almost nothing in this article, but, there it is from a supposedly erudite think flank.

Source link:
Rush Limbaugh was right | Salon
---------------------------
July 15, 2008
"It's official: The Bush era has made liberals so terrified of right-wing smears it has caused them to completely lose their sense of humor.

Much as I hate to repeat one of Rush Limbaugh's flat, stale and unprofitable applause lines, that's the only conclusion I can draw after witnessing the left-wing blogosphere's bizarre reaction to the New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office as a dishdasha-clad Muslim terrorist, exchanging a "terrorist fist jab" with Michelle Obama, who is dressed like a latter-day Angela Davis with huge 'fro, combat boots, assault rifle and bandolier of bullets -- while Osama bin Laden looks approvingly on from a picture frame and an American flag burns merrily in the presidential fireplace. To judge from the reaction of much of the left, you'd think that New Yorker editor David Remnick had morphed into some kind of hideous hybrid of Roger Ailes and Roland Barthes and was waging an insidious Semiotic War against Obama.

I don't know what lugubrious planet these people are on, but I definitely don't want any of them writing material for Jon Stewart.

After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that "irony was dead." Seven years later, they've been proven right -- but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity -- it's been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.


Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits. Or, at least, all satire except that which the cowering -- but oh so semiotically sophisticated -- left-wing commentariat deems to be sufficiently broad-brush and polemical to pass its funny test. There's no arguing taste in humor, of course, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that those who find Barry Blitt's drawing completely unfunny have traded their appreciation of subtlety and nuance for an instrumental, ends-obsessed, political-unto-death worldview. The prominent blogger Atrios, for example, writes of the cartoon, "It obviously was an attempt at satire, but it fails. It represents the basic stuff that you get from the Right about Obama, but it neither mocks nor exaggerates them." Atrios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven't seen -- oops, I shouldn't have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites -- but I haven't come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall.

The more brain-dead among the posters on left-wing blogs angrily denounce the New Yorker cover as itself racist. Merely to acknowledge racism, for them, is to be racist. This view, which in its Manichaean purity oddly recalls the hysterical reaction of some Muslims to the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, represents the reductio ad absurdum of political correctness: Not a single work of satire could ever pass this paranoid test. With some exceptions (notably the conservative commentator Michelle Bernard on "Hardball"), few of the pundits who criticized the New Yorker went this far: They merely expressed outrage, or concern, that by running the cartoon, the New Yorker was unwittingly carrying the right's water for it.

A couple of points need to be made about this. Yes, the right wing is obviously trying to paint Obama as a Muslim terrorist sympathizer -- it's the only card they have to play. And yes, there are ways that the mainstream media can, and has, "laundered" such scurrilous smears -- Fox News is expert at them. ("Tonight at 8: Is Obama a Muslim fanatic, or merely a white-hating traitor? We report, you decide.") But it should be obvious that there's a fundamental difference between mocking something and laundering it. Some on the left, however, are so terrified that Americans, in their cosmic stupidity, cannot distinguish between satire and smear that they reject satire. After Obama wins, they decree, there will be time for all the sophisticated ha-ha. But right now, imagery must be as tightly controlled as at an exhibition of Stalinist realism paintings. As Ari Fleischer said, we must all watch what we do, watch what we say..."