The Stupid Party

I've been emailing back and forth with some liberal friends who, presuming a bit too much sophistication on the part of some of our fellow Americans, don't see what the fuss is about with now-infamous New Yorker cover, which features the Democratic nominee posed next to an Oval Office portrait of Osama bin Laden, in identical garb, terrorist-fist-bumpin' with Michelle got up as a Black Pantheress, complete with machine gun and combat boots (to complete the tableau, an America flag burns in the fireplace). They say: no worries, because obviously it's satire.

Not so obviously.

From Media Matters, we learn this:

In a July 13 online poll, the conservative website WorldNetDaily.com asked readers to "[s]ound off on the New Yorker's cover with turban-wearing [Sen. Barack] Obama, gun toting wife [Michelle Obama]" by choosing one of 12 options, including the factually baseless options: "Funny, because there's some truth in it" and "The image isn't too far from the dangerous truth about the Obama family." While the New Yorker said in a press release that its cover "satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama's campaign," for a majority of respondents to WND's poll, the cover apparently provided support for their false perceptions of Obama's religion and patriotism: As of 10:07 a.m. ET on July 14, the most popular option in the poll -- selected by 60 percent of WND respondents -- was "The image isn't too far from the dangerous truth about the Obama family." The second-most popular option was "Funny, because there's some truth in it," which was selected by 11 percent of respondents.

For the record, "The image will only add to the massive publicity Obama receives while McCain remains in the shadows" gets 6 percent (those fiendish, fiendish liberals!); "tasteless and offensive" scores but 3 percent. Seven percent found it satire.

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