And I have to say seeing the image in hard copy on the magazine is jarring. It's the opposite of satirical. It's a racist image posing as satire.
I saw Remnick interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, and he said that the cover was "Colbert in print." It's tedious to explain how wrong he is. Like those folks here who claim the cover is "too hip for the room"--the hip racists as another diarist referred to them--it's clear that Remnick has a shaky grasp of what satire is.
Had the exact same image been in a thought bubble above Karl Rove's head, the cartoon (The Politics of Fear) would have made sense. Had the cartoon appeared on the day of Obama's inauguration, it would have still been tasteless, but actually could have been seen as a semi-humorous swipe at the fears of frustrated Obama-haters.
In the absence of such context, the image has to stand as a piece of racist propaganda, fit for the cover of the KKK Monthly, but not the nation's best magazine.
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