Obama Smeared By New Yorker Cover
New Yorker magazine should be ashamed of their upcoming cover art which depicts presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife as anti-American terrorists. Never before have I witnessed such distasteful and disgraceful imagery on the cover of a magazine that I once respected.
The response from the New Yorker has been that the cover was meant to be satire, playing on the politics of fear prevalent in the country these days. I would like to ask the editors at the magazine what the intention was behind the cover. If it was meant to provoke those who harbor such ignorant beliefs to think about their rationality, they missed their mark by a long-shot. If anything, I would say they helped to further push that ignorance on the public.
Bill Burton, spokesman for the Obama campaign called the cover, "tasteless and offensive." That pretty much says it. It wasn't funny. Look for yourself, let it sit a minute. How sad that we live in a time where an intelligent, charismatic candidate is attacked publicly in this way for no justifiable reason. Yeah, his middle name is Hussain, not helpful to his image, but is that reason to doubt his sincerity or his ability to lead this country?
I usually stay away from the subject of politics, but this one I had to speak on. I think Obama is one of the only chances that this country has at redeeming itself in the eyes of the rest of the world. Lets face it, the last eight years have not been good for our public image, Bush has done a great job at demonizing America to the world.
If there isn't a drastic change in our foreign policy and an end to this ridiculous war, we have little to no hope of turning this around and becoming a part of the world community. Whether or not you like Obama, I think we can all agree that we don't want to be seen by the rest of the world as ignorant racists. Even though people with that low level of tolerance and intelligence do exist in this country, do we really want to illustrate their ignorance and have it front row at the news stands? Do we believe that people overseas will find this funny? That they will recognize it as satire and be amused?
People are offended here at home, why would the rest of the world be any different? It's a true outrage to allow this bigotry to stand. The New Yorker owes Obama and his wife an apology and should be pulling the cover before its published and distributed. Clearly, this will never happen, and these cheap theatrics will probably sell a record number of magazines, but they will never see a dollar from this outraged whiteboy again.
