Robert Mugabe may be a Fighter, but is Barack Obama a 6525th level cleric?  Because that’s apparently what it would take to cast a “World Racial Healing Spell.”  That’s right, the worlds of politics and Dungeons and Dragons have collided on the campaign trail.

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This week’s New York Times Magazine prominently features an article on Barack Obama and the supposed “End of Black Politics,” but before I could starting reading it, I couldn’t help noticing something familiar about the picture that accompanied the article.

Did I go on to read it?  Heck no!  Instead, true to the way of the internets, I added my own captions, did some Wikipedia research, and created a graphic for your enjoyment — after the jump. more »

Hendrik Herzberg, who is some sort of editor at The New Yorker (though that shadowy cabal never ever publishes a masthead, so aside from Remnick, it’s kind of unclear what everyone does), and my very, very favorite political columnist in Talk of the Town—I read him and Anthony Lane (and anything by Louis Menand) even when I don’t have time to do anything but look at the cartoons and recycle—has responded to the on- and off-line media generally shitting itself over the recent Obama cover.

He takes a couple pot-shots at the OTI demo, viz.:

As David Remnick and others (me, for example) have been pointing out every chance we get, the target of Barry Blitt’s image was not the Obamas. The target was the grotesque pack of lies about the Obamas that have been widely disseminated, not only by marginal right-wing Web sites and sicko viral e-mail campaigns but also by such nominally respectable outfits as Fox News.

That is the part that a lot of people—sophisticated people, non-irony-challenged people, people who watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert without a trace of bafflement [That's us! —Ed.]—fail to “get.”

The whole thing is worth a read, because he dissects, in a clearheaded way, the alarmist (and, in his view, condescending) hand-wringing that the cover provokes.

He actually addresses a point made in the comments on Stokes’s post about this—the difficulty of making jokes about Obama, or, in an unfortunate, non-equivalent restatement, whether Obama can “take a joke.”

His rationale, that Obama is not the target of the joke so that it’s really not forhim to take it well or not, is over-nice and a little disingenuous, and I don’t buy it. It’s like calling someone fat and then claiming you were satirizing the nation’s obesity problem.

Elton John stuns the audience at his benefit concert for Hillary Clinton with a scathing political rewrite of “Candle in the Wind.”

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Last week, I was sitting in a bar in the village of Ngare Ndare in northern Kenya, nursing a Krest Bitter Lemon, and listening to the radio. The radio was tuned to Metro FM, “Kenya’s House of Reggae.” Amidst the chain of nondescript contemporary reggae hits, the refrain of one song in particular caught my attention: “Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, woi wooooi” As soon as I got back to my computer, I learned that the song is by Jamaican reggae artist Cocoa Tea, whose substantial back catalogue is only probably familiar to reggae and dancehall enthusiasts. Despite Cocoa Tea’s relative obscurity in the US, the song is already becoming massively popular in Kenya, even though it was only released sometime last week. (MP3 after the jump.) more »