Check it out here: http://yusanmoon.wordpress.com/

He also has a Wikipedia article on him according to his blog, which is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu-san_moon

okay, good, now this is funny. Wish the New Yorker had thought of it first.

should have been at the beginning of my post. Either WP is eating your words, Colin, or I screwed up with my limited HTML skills (most likely).

Absolutely, although weren’t we having the same conversation about Swift-boating four years ago around this time? Turns out we did have some pretty serious problems in 2004 after all – and one of them is starting to look a little familiar: the Republicans kicking our ass by creating unsettling messages that made people too uncomfortable to vote Democratic. So now we’re doing it instead? [Yes, the New Yorker isn’t and shouldn’t be a tool of the Democrats and/or the Obama campaign, but it’s also not the Mississippian.]

I don’t have that crystal ball, but I know too many people trying to reason with their relatives (myself included) who were sucked in by the Jeremiah Wright stuff and are still – STILL – forwarding that “Obama is really a Muslim” e-mail. This brouhaha keeps them thinking about it, not because they read the New Yorker, but because we now have something that has the liberals poking fun at the rednecks AND up in arms with each other – a real two-fer. You don’t have to be a George Lakoff acolyte or marketing genius to see this is handing Fox and its minions exactly what they want to see.

Let’s not confuse self-censorship with self-discretion and self-restraint: we’re not a party of Tourette’s sufferers. We’re trying to win an election, and we’ve got a limited amount of time and bandwidth left to do it right. When stuff like this happens, we’re not talking to the “family values” crowd about McCain abandoning his disabled first wife for Cindy’s millions because the woman who waited for her POW to come home was no longer a babe. We’re not talking to blue-collar workers about McCain’s free-market-run-amok economic policies. We’re not talking about how, since we haven’t discovered the magic elixir to keep John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsberg alive indefinitely, we’re on the verge of losing any number of progressive battles for generations to come. Instead, we’re talking about our guy and reinforcing that he and his wife are different (and therefore more scary) than anyone who’s successfully run for President before.

Say the most outrageous things that you want. Let Stewart, Colbert, Leno, Letterman (or their writers, as the strike taught us) and Parker and Stone take their best shot. Exercise every ounce of free speech the Constitution gives you and then some, and I’ll be among your defenders. But remember who the target is. It’s not the silly (voting) Americans who believe something about Obama that’s racist, untrue, or both. Their racism isn’t a boil that will burst if we poke it enough – we really just need to leave the festering people alone until their hate shrivels from pure isolation.

If funny works, I’m all for funny. I just don’t think this works, and I’d trade a little restraint now to have the last laugh poking fun at President Barack Obama (do we think Chappelle could make a comeback for that?) And call me crazy, but I think the scary Stepford heiress Cindy McCain is a much better comedic target than Michelle Obama any day of the week.

The great thing about humor is that it’s in the eye of the beholder — and I thought this was funny as hell, and apparently so did the New Yorker editors. Just like I think the Daily Show is funny, and Colbert, and (back in the day) Dave Chappelle, and every now and then, even Rush Limbaugh (batten down the hatches!).

The thing is, I don’t mind being offended. Period. In fact, I’d rather see or read something that offends me in a revealing way than to see something that just reinforces what I already believe. If it offends me (unless it’s just being gross for the sake of gross, for instance), there’s a reason — and that reason may well reveal something significant. The McCain-in-the-birthing-room magazine cover you describe wouldn’t bother me in the slightest — I’d love to see it, if were done in an interesting and clever way and made a valid point. Why should the idea of something so outside the norm of allowed discussion bother us? It’s just an image — it can’t hurt anybody by itself. As it is, our political culture is so sanitized already, so constrained in the range of topics discussed in public, and people want rein it in even tighter?

As I said in the article, we should be very, very careful any time we restrict the range of allowed public discourse. In this case, I am HAPPY to risk losing a vote here and there if it means we keep freedom of expression — otherwise, what’s this democracy thing all about? Don’t NOBODY tell me what to think or what to say, and that should be true for all of us.

In any case, as I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t think that anyone who’s swayed by this cover is terribly likely to have been a potential Obama voter. Just because some people won’t get the joke, we don’t get to make it? If that’s our version of “creative” culture these days, count me out.

So we’re all supposed to sit around and say nice things and then Obama gets elected and everything works out? Bullshit — if some people have a bizarrely distorted view of him, it matters, and the best thing to do is drag it out into the light, regardless of whether or not it makes people who think that way feel stupid or talked-down-to — and a magazine editor is not really responsible for the feelings of people who don’t read his publication. Remember, the New Yorker editor does not work for the Obama campaign, he works for the magazine’s publisher and its readers.

There are a ton of Americans out there who are looking for an excuse not to vote for Obama for reasons that we don’t really like to think about (shhh, don’t tell, but I heard that he’s a Negro), and they’re going to find that excuse regardless of what you or I write or say in public. I happen to believe that Obama picks up more votes because of his history and background than he loses, but that’s just my guess — and it’s exactly as good as anyone else’s guess, since none of us here has a working crystal ball that I know of.

I just can’t see how this is Dems “shooting themselves in the foot” — you need to show me a significant number of voters who were turned against him because of this illustration for me to believe that. Otherwise, it’s just your guess against mine. To me, this is HEALTHY. A good thing. A positive. Free speech, baby — it’s yours for just as long as you’re willing to defend it.

Most of them are not readers of the New Yorker, which we could be thankful for, except that this is so hard core (spot-on, maybe, but so spot-on it turned my stomach) that now it’s news. And their boys Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly will be talking about it ad nauseum (oops, a Latin word — note to self: try “non-stop” instead) and each time they do, reinforcing it just a little bit more. And you can bet Rush and Bill won’t be presenting it as satire, except to remind them that the New Yorker (and by implication the Dems) think they’re stupid.

Do the lib-ruls have to be so g-d clever that once again, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot? The way to deal with this is not to point out its ridiculousness or to reason with middle America, it’s to ignore it until it goes away. Every effort that reinforces this meme before the election is simply not helping.

I too believe in free speech and Obama should’ve just laughed this one off. It concerns me a bit that they can’t take a joke.

link to that McCain cartoon we were musing over, except it’s not going to be displayed on magazine racks for the next several weeks like the New Yorker cover will.

Are either of these satirical cartoons really that good, anyway?

Somehow, they don’t quite meet the Colbert correspondents’ dinner standard, IMHO.

Another thing – mildly interesting that I don’t hear anyone crowing about the insult of that New Yorker cover to the oval office itself–you know, respect for “the office” and all.

Hey man, excellent question. Let’s think of it this way — what if some group of Dem Swift-Boater equivalents were spreading rumors that McCain had lost it and was really being propped up by a Right Wing cabal. And Lefty blogs were repeating it as fact without confirmation, it was being spread by viral email and through online social networks, and was convincing a fair number of people no matter how often the campaign denied it. Sounds crazy? No more than the idea that a Senator from Illinois running for President being thought of as a secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate.

In that case, the New Yorker SHOULD run exactly the cover you talked about. And in any case, The Onion probably will, if they haven’t already — Jon Stewart et al make a lot of “you’re old, dude” jokes about McCain already.

I really stand by my thinking that anyone who doesn’t get this as satire was not terribly likely to have voted for Obama in the first place. I’d rather lose a couple of votes here and there than lose freedom to speak my mind — self-censorship IS censorship. Sometimes it’s appropriate (“my god, that dress looks TERRIBLE on you”), but we should ALWAYS take great care when we restrict the range of discourse that we allow. You and I were both in college during the height of Political Correctness, and left-wing censorship is no prettier than right-wing censorship.