Tuesday, July 15, 2008

If You Can't Take the Heat

One of todays' top news stories - the New Yorker ran an article on the rumors and outright lies that have been passed around about Barack Obama. To illustrate this, the cover shows all of the myths at once with Barack dressed as a Muslim and his wife as a 60s radical with a portrait of Osama bin Ladin hanging from the wall and the US flag burning in the fireplace.

You would think that the Obama campaign would welcome a major magazine doing a debunking. You would be wrong. They are upset about the cover.

To put things in perspective, President Bush is regularly portrayed as Dick Cheney's puppet, as a chimp, as a devil with his ears forming horns, and as a Nazi soldier with blood dripping from his vampire fangs. Jon Stuart jokes that when Bush and Cheney get together they kill kittens. I won't go into the things that Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann say about him.

If Obama is upset about an ironic painting used to illustrate a smpathetic article in a sympathetic magazine then how will he react to the abuse that residents take? How will his supporters react?

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