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.

There’s a mid-to-large sized kerfuffle brewing over Barry Blitt’s cover art for the latest New Yorker (at left).  As you can see, it shows a caricature of Barack Obama exchanging a “terrorist fist jab” with his wife in the oval office.  His outfit is vaguely Muslim, hers is Sandinista chic (or possibly Black Panther chic).  A picture of Osama Bin Laden hangs on the wall, and the American flag burns in the fireplace.  Subtle it ain’t.

But it’s hard for me to understand why people find this picture offensive.   If I was a right-wing smearmonger, I suppose might be less than pleased with the cartoon’s message (basically, “You guys are dicks”).  But most of the outrage seems to be coming from liberals.   Do they think that the New Yorker is honestly suggesting that this is what an Obama presidency would look like?  Honestly, the New Yorker? A magazine whose editorial slant is two, maybe three steps to the right of Mother Jones?  A magazine, furthermore, as famous for its cartoons as for its liberal slant?  Come on now.  The title of the picture is  “The Politics of Fear,” and while you wouldn’t know that from looking at the cover, the message is still painfully obvious.  Maybe it needs a caption (sort of like the one in that one South Park episode) that says “THIS IS WHAT THE REPUBLICAN SMEAR MACHINE IS ACTUALLY TELLING PEOPLE.”*

But actually, most of the people complaining about this do seem to understand that it’s a joke.  They’re just worried that Joe Six-Pack McVotesalot is going to be too dumb to understand the subtext; an attitude I find both depressing and vaguely insulting.  Others have more generalized complaints:  a spokesman for the Obama campaign just called the thing tasteless and unfunny.  (This is probably to be expected:  political campaigns aren’t really allowed to find anything funny.)  Obama himself  has said that the cover is obviously protected by our right to free speech, but might be offensive to Muslim Americans.  There’s a kernel of truth to this.  It is offensive when people accuse Obama of being a Muslim as if it was a horrible thing.  It’s also offensive when people rush to defend him from the pernicious charge of Muslimhood.  It’s particularly offensive when Obama’s campaign prevents two women wearing hijabs from being photographed with Obama at a ralley. (Thankfully, as the link indicates, Obama has apologized long and hard for this last.) Still, it’s hard for me to see where this picture goes over the line.  Yes, it’s a fairly grim piece of satire, but it’s well within the bounds of what’s appropriate.  Look, people ARE making these claims - not just that Obama is a Muslim, but that he’s a radical Muslim, that he’s soft on terror, and that his wife is a dangerous Marxist.  Are we supposed to ignore that, and hope they’ll shut up before the election?  Are we supposed to engage them in intelligent debate, as if they deserve to be taken seriously?  Mockery is the only sensible response to this insanity; mockery is what the cover delivers.

Or am I off base?  Flame me in the comments if you disagree.

Slate, by the way, has some very good tangentially related stuff.  1:  Where the phrase “terrorist fist-jab” might have actually come from.  2:  The body language terrorists actually use to greet eachother.

23/6 has an excellent and comprehensive guide to moral outrage over the New Yorker cover.

* Except for the flag burning.**

** As far as I know.