For four days now, the left side of the electorate has been scratching its collective head and asking itself, “Why don’t I think this is funny?” Of course, “this” is the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker; it has inspired all manner of hand-wringing and tsk-tsking – as well as a series of progressively more desperate attempts by the man who green-lit the gag, New Yorker editor David Remnick, to scream to the masses, “Would you people just lighten up?”

One general theme of the criticism is the fear that while the cartoon clearly was intended as satire, it might be “read” as true by a certain unsavory slice of the populace. This view is summed up in a cartoon by the Washington Post’s Tom Toles:

Another suggestion, particularly among lefties, is that the New Yorker has offended its target audience because it published an image that eventually might have been dreamed up anyway – by a magazine that caters to Obama haters rather than his likely constituents. Some have noted that they wouldn’t have been surprised to see such a cartoon, stripped of any ironic context, on the cover of National Review. Cartoonist David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has lampooned such literalism, imagining a liberal’s fantasy of how National Review could offend its own audience: (more…)