He has an interesting take on the New Yorker cover and I adore the phrase "media lickspittles" to describe Fox news. I think he's right. Obama supporters are taking the right too seriously.
Salon: After 9/11, some pious nitwits, suffering from an America-centrism akin to the medieval belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, intoned that "irony was dead." Seven years later, they've been proven right -- but not in the way they intended. Irony may have been killed, but not by sincerity -- it's been killed by cynicism. Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.
Since the essence of satire is exaggerating negative stereotypes, this means that satire itself is off limits. Or, at least, all satire except that which the cowering -- but oh so semiotically sophisticated -- left-wing commentariat deems to be sufficiently broad-brush and polemical to pass its funny test. There's no arguing taste in humor, of course, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that those who find Barry Blitt's drawing completely unfunny have traded their appreciation of subtlety and nuance for an instrumental, ends-obsessed, political-unto-death worldview. The prominent blogger Atrios, for example, writes of the cartoon, "It obviously was an attempt at satire, but it fails. It represents the basic stuff that you get from the Right about Obama, but it neither mocks nor exaggerates them." Atrios may be reading secret e-mails from Fox News containing Protocols of the Elders of Obama that I haven't seen -- oops, I shouldn't have made a joking reference to that noxious forgery, because by so doing I have played into the hands of anti-Semites -- but I haven't come across any right-wing hits on Obama that feature an American flag burning in the White House fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall.
