Barry Blitt is one of the best political cartoonists around, and his latest New Yorker cover does not disappoint.  It depicts Barack Obama in Muslim garb fist-bumping wife Michelle in militant gear in the Oval Office, in front of a portrait of Osama bin Laden over a hearth where an American flag burns. 

Incendiary? 

It's called satire. 

Fresh from Nutsgate, this is the last thing the Obama campaign needs, and Obama is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with it.  Who can he reject and repudiate? The candidate not known for his stellar sense of humor, used to being coddled by adoring crowds, has reacted, as he is wont to do, with his unique brand of dismissive outrage at the affront.

The main argument his campaign has against the obviously satirical cover of this highbrow magazine is that it "repeats the rumor" that Obama is a Muslim, which it indeed does. But where the campaign gets it wrong is in assuming that it's everybody else's responsibility, and not theirs, to deal with this rumor in a way that diffuses it, something Blitt's cartoon actually does quite well.

But this is the pattern in the Obama campaign.  In the primary, FOBOs castigated his opponents for any criticism of their candidate, arguing that even appropriate and legitimate criticisms, never mind specious or outright ridiculous ones, would simply give aid and comfort to the enemy.  

Now hyperventilating Obamoids around the nation are absurdly worried that this cover will be used as a recruiting tool for the right.  Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar opines, "Who knows if they'll get this in Dubuque," and warns:

this is going to upset a lot of people, probably for the same reason it's going to delight a lot of other people, namely those on the right: Because it's got all the scare tactics and misinformation that has so far been used to derail Barack Obama's campaign — all in one handy illustration. Anyone who's tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who's tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism— well, here's your image.

Sklar is getting a little meta here.  She's saying that the clever folks on the left are going to be upset because they suspect the troglodytes on the right (and some Hillary-supporters on the left, I'm sure) won't get that the cover, which is a cartoon, is not a realistic, literal depiction of the Obamas.  Because polls show that most Americans can't tell the difference between a cartoon drawing and photograph.

Who knows if they'll get it in Dubuque?  Which takes us back to the Obama campaign's undercurrent of condescension, which will undo the candidate if his being a secret Muslim in league with Al Qaeda doesn't. Of course, what the New Yorker cover clearly does is exposes the scare tactics of the fringe right as patently silly, something you don't need to have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard to see. 

There is, in fact, very little danger that anyone will take it very seriously.  But an interesting thing happened on the way to press.  The reaction of the Obama camp has managed to turn a satire of their enemies' scare tactics into yet another exposé of their own humorless condescension.

By puffing up and declaring the cover "tasteless and offensive," they not only lend credence to the made-up conspiracies and controversies the cartoon lampoons, but they show their inability to effectively address them for what they are — not just false, but laughable, patently ridiculous.  The real danger is not that people in the cultural hinterland won't get it.  The danger is that Obamoids will use it as another opportunity to express their presumed superiority over those they assume won't. 

Again and again, Obamoids have expressed frustration and fear that the rest of us are too stupid to "get it."  Again and again they have argued that we should refrain from criticizing their candidate, for fear of giving aid and comfort to his enemies.  What makes this instance more complex is that his caricature is actually being used to criticize his enemies.  Meta.  That's where a PhD comes in handy.

My sense is that outraged Obamoids will end up the butt of the joke in the end, though, yet again.  The cover gives their candidate a perfect opportunity to distance himself from the "cultural elite" the New Yorker, in the popular imagination, caters to. In other words, from them.