NewsBusted: Lessons Learned From the Right-Wing Response to the Obama New Yorker Cover

McCain (center) tortured by Obama (left), Bush (top), and Hillary (right) from Rolling Stone

Michelle Obama (left) and Barack Obama (right) engage in a "terrorist fist pound" in the Oval Office on the cover of The New Yorker.

NewsBusters is running an article this week that decries the lack of media outrage over a cartoon in Rolling Stone. The iconic music publication depicts McCain in a bamboo cage being tormented by Asian caricatures of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Hoping to squeeze just a little bit of water from the Liberal Media stone, Newsbusters columnist Tom Blumer asks how is it that the above cartoon portrayal didn't seem to bother Old Media at all, while they're falling all over themselves in going after The New Yorker's portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama

Because it's not offensive. That's how.

The now infamous New Yorker cartoon depicts a number of rather nasty and vicious racial and ideological stereotypes which are, even now, applied to Barack Obama. Obama is depicted as a Muslim (he isn't) who hates America (he doesn't) burning the American Flag (he hasn't) and idolizing Osama Bin Laden (seriously?) while Michelle Obama is shown as a heavily armed 70s style black power revolutionary. Only their "terrorist fist pound" shows the cartoon for the satire it is.

The outrage over the New Yorker cartoons stems from the fact that these absurd prejudices are not absurd at all and are in fact held by thousands, perhaps millions of Americans. Media outlets and consumers alike have decried the New Yorker cover because it lends legitimacy, intended or otherwise, to the bigoted and ignorant fringe that seriously believes Barack Obama to be a secret militant Islamic Manchurian candidate and his wife to be an assault rifle packing black-power revolutionary.

The Rolling Stone cartoon does none of these things. It portrays McCain a a tortured war veteran. The casting of Obama, Bush, and Clinton as his torturers - the entire point of the cartoon really - depends upon their depiction as North Vietnamese. The cartoon does not insinuate that Obama, Bush, and Clinton torture because they are Vietnamese (because they aren't) nor does it suggest that they are somehow less patriotic, loyal, or American because of their ethnic, cultural, or political background (none of which actually enter into the cartoon).

In short, NewsBusters and its partisan hack of a columnist completely miss the point, both of the New Yorker cartoon and the response to it. In a rather odd way, this third rate columnist on a fourth rate news site demonstrates the New Yorker's point more elegantly than its flag-ship cartoonist could manage: the desperate ideological zealots in GOP will say and do anything to win an election; truth, decency, and even their increasingly tenuous grip on reality be damned.

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