Via Ambinder, now for the most important item of the day:

No doubt, there will be a hue and cry about “ageism.”  The thing that seems strange to me is that every time someone tries to do a McCain parody of the now-infamous New Yorker cover, they end up denying the intention and context of the satire that they are parodying.  There is essentially nothing in this image that is not an exaggeration, or just a representation, of things that are true about John McCain: he is old, his wife once had a problem with prescription drugs, he is closely aligned with George Bush and he does support policies that violate the Constitution.  As a caricature, it works quite well.  As a parody of an image that is supposed to be mocking absurd claims about the Obamas, it completely fails, because the point of the New Yorker image is supposed to be that everything in it is ludicrous and false and obviously so and, more to the point, it is supposed to be exaggerating the absurd claims to their most extreme form.  (The problem with the original image, as I’ve said before, is that it did not exaggerate the claims, but simply repeated them.) 

The more of these parodies people produce, the more literally audiences may take the New Yorker image.  For all of the people who dismiss the argument that there will be people who won’t “get” the satire of the original, there are an awful lot of supposedly clever sophisticates who seem not to understand how to reproduce what the image tried to do, which suggests that they didn’t really “get” it, either.  To do a proper McCain adaptation of the image, you would need to draw an image that combined all of the false smears that have ever been circulated about him by George Bush’s campaign and others, which would mean creating a cartoon so distasteful that no one in his right mind would ever publish it.   

Update: Via Patrick Appel, it would seem that my Scene colleague Peter Suderman is too optimistic when he says:

While polls indicate that a reasonable percentage of Americans still identify Obama as a Muslim, there’s no serious, mainstream belief that he and his wife are terrorist collaborators, gun-slinging militants who pal around with mass murderers and villains.

Technically, Peter may be right, since there is no serious mainstream belief along these lines, but claims that are not far from these do seem to circulate with some considerable frequency.  As I said last week:

But the flag in the fireplace isn’t much of an exaggeration at all of various false charges that Obama has no respect for the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance or what-have-you.  The hubbub over Obama’s “endorsement” by Hamas as some kind of “proof” that he was friendly to Hamas or bad for Israel and the basic assumption shared by many Republicans that leaving Iraq is “surrender” to Al Qaeda (or something like that) aren’t exaggerated very much by the picture of Bin Laden. 

The state senator mentioned in Appel’s post has a telling quote defending his use of an image associating Obama with bin Laden:

You know, blogs are for satire and whatnot and, um, that’s why it’s up. It’s similar to the New Yorker picture. Maybe that’s why this has gotten so much attention, because of that thing that came out a couple days ago.

More than perpetuating falsehoods, the New Yorker cover will now be invoked as a defense for every image that depicts Obama unironically as a terrorist and enemy with some remark along these lines: “Hey, this is just like that New Yorker picture, so there’s no problem.” 

Filed under: idiocy, politics