Weeks after the release of New Yorker's now infamous "Obama" cover, depicting the candidate and his wife as terrorists, the image continues to be the file most often downloaded by radical right wingers, militia groups, the KKK and fundamentalist Christians.
New Yorker editor David Remnick's continues to insist that the cover was just "satire" and intended to make fun of rumors about Obama's connection to Middle Eastern terrorists. However, the people he claims to be satirizing don't see the cover as satire at all. "Satire is funny, and there's nothing funny about Osama Obama," McCain supported Harry Bax explained on a recent cable talk show.
"The New Yorker image confirms what we've been saying all along," Christian Freedom Front chairman Pointer Head announced yesterday. "Iraq isn't going to bring the terrorists home to America, it will be Obama." KKK Grand Kleegle Wit Dimmer posted on a recent blog: "It may look like a cartoon, but that cover of Obama's as real as the photograph of Jesus I keep on my desk."
Recent surveys of committed Republicans, Pro-Lifers and Bubbas show that 24 percent more now believe Obama is a terrorist than did before the cover's publication. A whopping 62 percent said the cover didn't change their opinion but it did confirm what they already knew.
Photos of the copyrighted cover have been attached to at least 2000 different chain emails since July 13, according to officials the Internet Trafficking Institute, a suspicious quasi-governmental research firm that keeps track of crazy rumors circulating as spam. "The Obama cover is by far more popular, and accepted as truth far more often than the bogus Darwin Award story about the redneck shooting his nuts off by using a bullet as a fuse for his pickup truck after frog gigging."
The fact that the cover came from a source long considered to be a bastion of liberal journalism by right wing pundits, made the accusations even more believable. "I got that New Yorker with my morning press briefing," President Bush told a recent press conference. "You mean it wasn't true?" Political commentator Rush Limbaugh claims the cover was an attempt to cover up Obama's terrorist connections by "bringing them right out into the open for every one to see. As if we aren't smart enough to see right through that."
Since his initial lukewarm reaction to the cover, Obama has stopped answering questions about the cover because he is too busy taking phone calls from the Iranian ambassador and his personal Imam.
Remnick has proposed to make things right with a new cover for the New Yorker October issue depicting John McCain in a wheelchair, hooked up to IVs and pandering to the Christian right. However, early reactions have been mixed. Liberal readers find the cover mean, the magazine's handful of conservative readers were deeply offended and Democratic partisans called the cover "too little, too late and too truthful to be satire."
Experts have proposed a number of psychological explanations for why reactions to the New Yorker cover have varied so far from the editor's explanations, including the phenomena of selection perception, biased assimilation and peripheral processing. Liberals, however, can't believe any one could be so naïve as to miss the point of the satire and conservatives only listen to intellectual crap if it supports what they already believe.
