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Jul 14 2008 10:06AM EDT

'New Yorker' Cover: It's Called a Joke, People

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Ah, summer. That glorious season when a "controversy" becomes a CONTROVERSY.

By all rights, the flap over The New Yorker's new cover ought to be enclosed in major scare quotes. The cartoon, of Barack Obama as a jihadist and his wife as a Black Panther, sharing a "terrorist fist jab" in the oval office, is clearly meant to stir the pot, in the tradition of iconic New Yorker covers like this one and this one.

But many on the left think the magazine did their candidate a grievous wrong by producing an image that will no doubt be used, unironically, to reinforce the same smears it's trying to send up. And Obama himself is among them: His spokesman called the cover "tasteless and offensive."

The backlash is such that the New Yorker's editor in chief, David Remnick, has already sought to explain himself in a Huffington Post interview.

The truth is, even if The New Yorker did Obama's foes a small favor, so what? Since when is a magazine supposed to worry about how its content will affect the political fortunes of one candidate or another before publishing? And if The New Yorker can't assume some sophistication on the part of its readership, what publication can?

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