Dear Obamas New Yorker Cover,

The trouble with satire is that most people don't get it. As you know. Still, I'll expect fair play and an equally ambiguous cover of McCain lampooning the Left's misconceptions about him. Let's see if your smart-smart audience (which includes me) can get it when it's their turn to be indirectly lampooned. Let's see if they get that the cover is about them and not about McCain. Why?

Simple. It's not that your cover is tasteless in its tapping into about a million asshat stereotypes about no less than three political minorities in the US. It's not that. It's that in addition to that tapping in, you are both affirming the bigotry and mythology of people who A. know better but manipulate their audience's who don't know better, and B. who don't know better. See, people who believe that Michelle is a militant feminist para-Black Panther and that Obama is a secret Muslim possibly sympathetic to the terrorist cause are not smart enough to read your cover and get that they're being lampooned. Or, maybe they're smart enough but not informed enough. The few who are will be furious and simply deploy the old saw about "East Coast elitism" and all those other old rusty saws that still manage to cut a bit of wood.

So, you failed. Becuase you are playing to your audience, and in your use of satire (indirect satire at that so even more complex) at the expense of gullible Americans, you are only assuring them that your readers Really Do Think They Are Stupid and that You Are Better Than They Are. Hence, feeding the culture war red herring that 'average Americans' Should Feel disdained by cultural/academic elites//The Left and should vote against anything and anyone they support out of that resentment -- even if the policy those Snooty People put forward would benefit average Americans tremendously.

Becuase you know, the Right respects average Americans even as it rakes them over the economic, educational, health policy, housing and red hot coals.

Look, I don't approve of the Right's button-pushing manipulation in the place of real political thinking or debate either, but address that. Put the Scarry Mythical Obama's in a thought bubble over Rush's head. Duh. Can't you hear it now, all over the right-wing media outlets, "Even the New Yorker thinks the Obamas....." Holy creeping prejudice!

So, you really failed. Tanked. Bombed. No one's laughing. I hope you had some fun snickering. It was a politically expensive snicker. Now, go snicker at the Left too. If you have real artists working for you, they can pull it off.

Where the hell is Mark Twain when we need him?