It’s a play on “skin.” Far from Shodan’s best effort, and he is (at times) wittier than he’s given credit for.
Of the cartoon? The punchline is that it’s ridiculous to see him as a radical Muslim and her as an Angela Davis-ish black nationalist.
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/mccain_campaign_obama_dems_wan.php
(Warning! Lefty site! Exposure to noxious facts possible!..)
McCain Campaign: Obama, Dems Want To Lose In Iraq Because It Helps Them Politically
Getting really ugly in a big-ass hurry. Oh, Lord.
So…what you are saying there 'luci is that, during an election year, one side (I know you think the other is pure as the driven snow) is using…can it be true…rhetoric, to attack the other side with?? Seriously?
:eek: Shocking!
-XT
Dear Puppy Dopers:
The “Angela Davis” your old uncle Marley 23 refers to was a professor at Berkeley and a firebrand black Communist, caricatured widely for her “afro” hairdo.
Now, get off my LAN.
Then it doesn’t work. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually confirmed that view among people who hold it.
I’m actually not old enough to know much about her myself. But one of my brothers is a Communist, and they tend to go for that whole throwback thing.
Win-win-win for the right wingers. They get to pass around an offensive cartoon with the excuse that the New Yorker did it first. If he complains he is thin-skinned, and if he doesn’t it’s because it must contain a “grain of truth”.
Seriously? A real honest-to-goodness Communist? Dialectical materialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, the whole thing? You sure he isn’t an FBI agent?
How many Obama supporters does it take to change a light bulb?
THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
One can always refuse to “get” a joke. Sometimes the humorless are the best targets of humor. The more Obama or his supporters give the impression that they cannot laugh at themselves, the more they are going to get laughed at by others.
Regards,
Shodan
It would have worked far better if they’d showed the Obamas in their normal clothes doing their fist bump on camera, which feeds to a TV screen that shows them in the exact same pose but with the terr’ist getups. Might be a bit crowded on the page, but I’ve seen it done economically and it would get across the point that they’re being portrayed as Muslim terr’ists much more effectively.
That’s a knee slapper! I loved it when I first heard it as a “feminist” joke. Thirty years ago.
But which version would have created more buzz and sold more magazines? That’s the definition of “worked” that is operable here.
How about John McCain covered in age-warts, spitting obscenities in a fit of rage, confused by a desk full of papers while his wife slumps over a pool of vomit in her lap, with bottles of spilled pills all around her? Knee slapper?
You know damn good and well I don’t think that. Just as surely as you know that this is baseless slander. “Rhetoric”, yer ass!
There are 2 things at work here - Image & Context
The image is awful, the context is satire. However, images have a nasty habit of escaping the bounds of context and becoming contextualized anew by viewers.
I agree that there is a segment of the population (a segment of those being satirized) who will mostly take the image as some sort of confirmation. Why feed this beast?
I feel the authors of the image are deeply ignorant and provincial if they think the only result of publication will be that like minded people will get a brief chuckle at their satire.
<Jon Stewart>Nailed it. </JS>
Trouble is, if you are going to refrain from any satire that might be misconscrewed, you won’t do any at all.
I don’t read The New Yorker, so I’m not familiar with the type of satire they feature on their covers. Is this one an outlier in terms of “tastelessness”? Have they mocked other efforts by the left to demonize the right-- maybe Bush dressed up as Hitler or something like that?
Too obvious.
Well 'luci, in point of fact I DON’T know if you feel that political slams come from the Dem side as much as from the Pub side…I assume that, while ‘pure as the driven snow’ may be hyperbolic (it was intended to be, ehe?) that you do think that the Dems are much more, um, restrained than the Pubs when it comes to such slams.
Also, while I think that it’s a stupid attack by McCain, and while I think it’s fairly baseless when applied to Obama (who, from my perspective looks to be backing away from any motions of pulling out the troops if he’s elected…not that I ever thought he actually would anyway, though he seems to be getting some flack from some on the left over such things), it’s not entirely ‘baseless slander’ if we are talking about the Dems as a whole (though the REASON isn’t that the Dems want us to lose…at least IMHO. THAT part I believe could be characterized as ‘baseless slander’, FWIW).
The thing is that your breathlessly pointing out that McCain et al are going to be using political rhetoric to attempt to paint Obama and the Dems with a broad brush is…well, it’s not exactly a Stop the Presses! kind of moment. Especially since it really doesn’t relate much to THIS thread.
YMMV however.
-XT