New Yorker Obama Cover: “A Satire of a Misperception?” (UPDATED)

Yeah, you heard that right: “a satire of a misperception.” I heard someone this evening give that pretty nuanced explanation of the (now infamous) political cartoon on the cover of this week's New Yorker magazine. And I "get" it -- the cartoon is clever, smart and biting.

But for the 30% of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that Obama is an angry, unpatriotic, secret black Panther Muslim terrorist sympathizer, it's quite a bit more straightforward: it simply confirms their belief that he's just no good.

After all, if even his friends are talking about it, there must be some truth to it.

Lastly, of course, it also confirms the view of the traditional media that Obama has a fundamental problem with white working class Americans. Or, as Stephen Colbert is wont to say after he shows (yet again) the video of Rev. Wright: "Why won't this story die?"

Speaking of Stephen Colbert, he is also a work of art that satirizes the misperceptions of the moonbat-class. As is Dave Chapelle (but not, when you get right down to it, Don Imus). Should we be unhappy with them as well? I can tell you that I heard Chapelle once say that he quit television because he realized much of his audience didn't get the nuance and was simply laughing at his caricatures of black people. He felt that he was somehow contributing to their ignorance. Colbert, too, has had some awkward moments with his audience but he hung in there and now it's pretty clear what the joke is all about when he goes on the air every night -- and that doesn't make his satire any less biting or on-point.

But the bottom line is this: there's a lot more at stake in the case of Obama. We've been through this in the last two election cycles and we'd like to avoid this kind of nonsense.

UPDATE: Then again, maybe I'm taking this personally and it's just business. Gary Kamiya has a point.