It's a F#%king Cartoon!

I wrote about the New Yorker Obama cartoon cover a bit before the media frenzy hit full force (and of course which has also virtually ignored the excellent piece on Obama inside the cover of the magazine). Not surprisingly, as someone who posts the political Cartoon of the Day, I appreciated the "outrageous" depiction.

The next day, as the sound and fury reached its apex, my husband Dave and I discussed the cartoon -- and he thought it was offensive. I observed that the media brouhaha not only allowed them to reach a virtual orgasm over the magazine cover (and it wasn't even Playboy), it had the added advantage of obscuring attention to silly news items like bank runs and reports on the extent of Bush torture regime.

Jon Stewart touched on this same theme (great minds think alike and all that), in his excellent piece on the cover. As The Huffington Post noted:

Jon Stewart took on the media and Barack Obama for overreacting to, and thus validating, the New Yorker cover controversy.

'It's a trifle, it's nothing,' Stewart said. 'There's so many other things to talk about: Iraq, the collapse of some of our most prestigious financial institutions...right?' he continued, before showing a montage of the media firestorm over the cover.

Best Stewart line:

Obama’s camp initially agreed that the cartoon was “tasteless and offensive”. Really? You know what your response should have been…let me put this statement out for you. Barack Obama is in no way upset about the cartoon that depicts him as a Muslim extremist because you know who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists, of which Barack Obama is not. It’s just a f%#!-ing cartoon! But as always, no where was the anger at the media hotter, than in the media.

(For The Colbert Report's take on this, see onegoodmove)

As a final note, in using the expletive deleted (of sorts) "F#%king" in the caption, I have added my own ironic touch to the matter. As Language Log explains, "concealment just calls attention to the expletive, and what's communicated to the reader is exactly what's communicated by the unconcealed version. The concealed version is not actually more decorous in content than the unconcealed version; it merely avoids printing the offending word."

Got that? It's a Fucking Cartoon, already!

(Video via Crooks and Liars)