Commentary: The New Yorker Should’ve Lampooned the Yokels Who Still Buy into the Anti-Obama Smears

By: Tonyaa Weathersbee

This is where the rubbery screech of racial stereotypes meets the political road.

This week, The New Yorker magazine featured a caricatured cover of Michelle and Barack Obama swathed in garb and surrounded by symbols designed to invoke more paranoia in post-Sept. 11 America. There’s gun-toting, Afro-wearing Michelle clad in combat boots and military fatigues and Barack in a turban and white robe. There’s a picture of Osama bin Laden on the wall and an American flag burning in the fireplace.

And for extra fear-mongering fun, the would-be First Couple is toasting their arrival in the White House with the Fox News-deemed "terrorist fist jab."

Magazine officials defended the cover, titled “The Politics of Fear,“ as satirizing the scare tactics and misinformation being used in the presidential campaign this year. It was intended to shine a light on the ludicrousness of those who insist on believing that Barack is a closet Muslim, and that there exists a video somewhere in which a militant Michelle is spewing all sorts of hatred toward whites.

Unfortunately, that cover will probably wind up being a gift to those who, when it comes to lambasting the Obamas, prefer the darkness.

That’s too bad.

COMMENTARY....

Obama campaign calls New Yorker cover offensive

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has sharply criticized The New Yorker magazine over the publication's latest cover illustration, which appears to portray the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and his wife as terrorist enemies of the United States.

The cover, published Sunday, shows Obama in the Oval Office dressed in traditional Muslim attire. His wife, Michelle, wears an Afro hairstyle and has a machine gun slung over her back. An American flag can be seen burning in the fireplace, and a picture of Osama bin Laden hangs on the wall.

"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," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. "But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."

Obama campaign calls New Yorker cover offensive....