Hey ! Dummy !

By now, everyone has seen the cover -- a caricature of Barack Obama and his wife on the cover of The New Yorker. Here we go again -- another tempest in a teapot. I thought it was funny. I’m vaguely familiar with The New Yorker so I didn’t think they meant any harm and -- besides -- I know a lot of people that want to believe it is literally true. Please note that I didn’t say they believe it -- they just want to believe it.

You might think I know these people because of where I live but I see a lot of the same sentiment online. I know some other people that were relieved when Hillary Clinton didn’t win the Democratic nomination. They believed that this campaign wouldn’t get so nasty if the hate-Clinton crowd didn’t have a Clinton in the race. Trust me, they’ll blame Clinton anyway and they now have some fresh meat to gnaw on.

The best headline I saw on the cover calamity was in the Los Angeles Times.

Barack Obama magazine flap shows an irony deficiency

”It seemed fairly obvious to me, my 8-year-old and, likely, the majority of readers of one of America's finest magazines that the cover drawing by Barry Blitt was a parody. In other words (for those still struggling with the concept), the joke was not on the Obamas but on the knuckle-walkers who would do them harm by trying to turn a couple of fresh-scrubbed Harvard Law grads into something foreign and scary.“

Now there’s a slick way to insult everybody. Those that are smart enough to figure out that they aren’t being called “knuckle-walkers” -- that instead, they are being manipulated by the “knuckle-walkers” -- will be smart enough to realize that their intelligence level is being compared to that of an 8 year old. That ought to win some friends and influence people.

Of course, then there’s the rest of the headlines for the day...

Bush Acts on Drilling, Challenging Democrats

“For years, my administration has been calling on Congress to expand domestic oil production,” Mr. Bush said in a brief Rose Garden appearance in which he sought to saddle his party’s opponents with responsibility for gasoline prices exceeding $4 per gallon. “Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal, and now Americans are paying at the pump.”

Anybody think you’re being manipulated with that one ? Everything I’ve read says we can’t drill our way out of the energy crisis. It won’t do a thing to lower gas prices. And if it was such an obviously-needed change of policy then why didn’t the Republicans change it when they controlled the Congress and the White House for 6 years ? I think we ought to designate the OCS and ANWR a “strategic reserve” and get focused on the fact that our dependence on oil is a strategic weakness.

'Air Panic: FAA woos teen controllers as mid-air crashes loom'

Now, there’s a doozy. Fortunately, it’s just Ben Mutzabaugh mocking a headline from the New York Post in his blog on USA Today.

Unfortunately, there are still 700,000 people a day that buy Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, 14,000,000 a week that listen to Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is still the top-ranked news channel. An appreciation of irony isn’t the only area in which we are deficient.

Don Brown
July 15, 2008