I thought my liberal rage might be busted.

[thisficklemob]

Then I saw this forthcoming New Yorker cover of Michelle and Barack Obama.

Ah, there it is.

(x-posted from my journal)

ETA: The Obama campaign's response. (And some of the comments on that post only prove that people really believe this shit.)

Comments

[kimbari]

*is fucking boggled*

[thisficklemob]

Me too.

[kimbari]

The comments on the response are equally boggling.

Obama is not a Muslim terrorist but he is a black man and therefore not presidential material. Michelle is also not a terrorist but can you really stand a black woman walking with her big black feet on the white house carpet?

This is the kind of shit black people have been hearing since our ancestors were pushed off the slave ships. Black = ugly, unworthy, ignorant... yet white people are *afraid* of us. Is that what "cognitive dissonance" means?

[thisficklemob]

I stopped reading comments when I ascertained it was going to make me despair for this country.

Racism is cognitively dissonant all over the place. If black people really were all those things, would the racists have to worry about their "daughters marrying one"?

And to answer their question, I will cheer the day the Obamas walk onto the White House carpet as its residents. (Though one wonders if this person has registered the fact that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell and Martin Luther King, Jr. and probably Shirley Chilsholm and countless other black people have walked on that suddenly hallowed carpet.)

[txvoodoo]

Good god.

[thisficklemob]

Really.

[sweet_ali]

Wow. Just... I think I'll have to shrug incredulously along with Obama. I'm also actually pretty surprised that it's a cover by The New Yorker. I don't care what their intended message was there. Talk about fucking up in the execution.

And now I really need to stop reading the commentary on the response article, as it's just painful.

[thisficklemob]

It is. And it pretty much proves the point that this is NOT successful satire.

[photosinensis]

Head/desk is my OTP right now.

I dunno, I kinda want to give Michelle Obama an AK-47. There's a good chance she'd point at the right people. You know, like the dude who put this on the front cover of the New Yorker.

[thisficklemob]

I don't know about that, but I'd feel a lot safer with it in her hands than Cindy McCain's, anyway.

[leezechka]

I don't understand why their intended message didn't include a similar bashing of McCain. They could have illustrated the two candidates instead of only showing the Obamas.

People see these images on newstands and don't read the articles, just like they vote without reading a single list of stances. The image should be equally stereotyping McCain, show an old old man in a diaper stomping the constitution and women's rights and handing money to corporations.

I am so fed up with the media feeling free to to rip apart the democrats and tiptoeing around McCain and Bush for fear of being called "liberal"

[thisficklemob]

Or losing their seats in the good section of the plane, or not getting invited to one of McCain's many homes for the weekend.

The really crazy part is that all the suggestions I've seen on how to similarly trash McCain are based in truth. The only one that may not be (I really don't want to know) is the diaper. And even that, assuming it's not true, is pointing to a fact: he's old. He will figuratively stomp on the Constitution and women's rights. He will figuratively hand money to corporations. He does have a violent temper. Even my own suggestion, that Cindy McCain be pill-popping, is based in reality.

Almost NOTHING about this cover is based in reality. Obama doesn't hate this country. He's not a Muslim (although it should be ok if he were), and he's nothing like Bin Laden. His wife isn't a violent revolutionary/Black Panther. ONLY the fist-bump has any basis. And that only scares very old, very white, or very scared people.

[delux_vivens]

His wife isn't a violent revolutionary/Black Panther.

Although how she's been treated during this election is making it clear why people become that way.