The New Yorker Cover & OWLS

Here I go again. Politics. The latest cover of The New Yorker has caused a bit of noise. This pretty much sums it up.

"See, the Rude Pundit's problem with the whole Barack-as-Muslim and Michelle-as-Black-Panther plus burning flag and bin Laden's picture in the Oval Office isn't that it's particularly offensive. It's that it's just not very funny. It's not even enough to make you go, "Hmmm." You glance at it once and think, "Yeah, some people think that, don't they? That's a shame." And there the whole joke ends. There's no more levels to it. It's like an Upper East Side version of South Park, an elitist attempt at crude humor, like an ironic fart at a wine tasting."

Fedora Tip Gastriques

Greg of Suspect Device also says it quite well.

And then there's Victor LaValle's take over at Maud Newton's site:

One dear friend in particular has been privy to a certain kind of dinner conversation. She’s in her mid-30’s but she dines out with Older White Liberals sometimes. And at those dinners the OWLS all say the same thing whenever the question of Obama’s Presidency arises: “I just don’t think the nation’s ready,” they say. “I mean I’m ready, I’d just love it. But I don’t think the nation’s ready yet.”

Inevitably these folks are over 50, generally well-off and liberal to a fault. And yet, now that Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for President they just can’t seem to get behind him. The last thing they’ll say on the subject is, “I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about him that I can’t get behind.”

"But still, truth is truth. While much has been made about the fears of working-class whites in Pennsylvania and, of course, the white South, this New Yorker cover is the product of a different but just as panicked constituency, the unassailable Upper West Side."

It's a friggin' cartoon, peoples.