Mighty Tasty
| Barack Obama says the
New Yorker’s cover is tasteless; the magazine
says it’s satire.
“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.” In a statement Monday, the magazine said the cover “ombines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are,” the Associated Press reported. “The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover,” the New Yorker statement said. Republican John McCain’s campaign spokesman, Tucker Bonds, told the AP that the cover was “tasteless and offensive.” |