I just got done lunching with my mom and am embarrassed that she (a more recent convert away from all things Republican) is motivated enough to cancel her subscription over that cover and I am not, at least not yet.
I strongly suspect the cover evinces incredibly poor editorial judgment, but was not meant to be taken literally. Trouble is, most of the country won't get the joke (it's a weak joke at best in any case) and thus the cover lends itself to various horrible uses.
But what can I get instead? I already let my New York Mag subscription lapse because a friend told me about their incredibly disrespectful and misleading treatment of a friend of a friend of hers (whom she was personally familiar with). I could get a weekend subscription to the Times, which I had been vaguely contemplated anyway, but I have avoided having a paying subscription to the New York Times since the belated revelation of wiretapping. And Time Out New York is decent for event coverage but not much for the more thoughtful material, actual journalistic coverage of world news.
Seriously, if the New Yorker is on the outs, what's left? I get most of my news online, but I really want something on paper that I can read on Saturdays, when I do not log on, and it's also nice to have magazines for sitting on subways and couches. Although I'm disgusted, I don't think this New Yorker cover is actually worse than the various lapses of the NYT during W's first term. But how and why has choosing among liberal media outlets, here in Manhattan, gotten so difficult???