<p>I understand what you are saying but my point was more about the cartoon and not the piece. If I commented on something you said out of context my apologies.</p>
<p>I assumed from looking at the cover, prior to reading the article, that it was a pro-Obama piece. I thought it was tasteless and shallow regardless of their intent. That being said my point is that I don’t hear any outcry when the POTUS is portrayed as a chimp or worse. I also see the intended humor in the piece (as well as the shots at Bush) and can separate the two. There are political cartoons every day that call Bush everything from a murderer to the devil. Everyone is fair game.</p>
<p>While I do believe the media is biased I also believe their primary loyalty is to the $$$'s. If they can sell extra papers or garner ratings they will.</p>
<p>“^^I really don’t think this is fair. The disease of addiction does affect people’s behavior - that is the nature of the illness as characterized by the educated, credentialed medical community. Cindy McCain, or anyone else for that matter, deserves compassion rather than discrimination for being in recovery from mental illness.”</p>
<p>My point is that if McCain were pushing his family into the spotlight, that would be inviting all sorts of stories, etc. about his wife and his marriage. </p>
<p>Many people --possibly most people in this country – view addicts/alcoholics as lacking morals and willpower. Most do not react with pity or compassion when hearing about someone with an addiction.</p>
<p>Also, just because a person is addicted doesn’t mean that they would become an embezzler and steal from a foundation that they started. Some people might wonder why poor crack addicts who steal get prison and no substance abuse treatment, while wealthy, connected, Cindy McCain got substance abuse treatment without any legal consequences. </p>
<p>Anyway, McCain’s keeping his family out of the spotlight is more than likely due to his desire to keep the public from focusing on his wife’s history as well as his dumping his first wife for her.</p>
<p>As for me, I’d be cheering for Cindy if she was using her experience to advocate to expand treatment options for addicts so that others could have the medical treatment that put her life back on track.</p>
<p>I had a similar thought earlier that if a candidate puts his wife out there on the campaign trail then it makes them fair game for the critics. I agree that is why McCain is shielding his family. I would do the same thing to be honest. I get the feeling Cindy McCain would be unlike any first lady we have ever had.</p>
<p>Garland, what specifically is racist about the cartoon? Obama has worn traditional Muslim garments when visiting his ancestral home. His post 9/11 statements attributed the attacks to a “fundamental absence of empathy” – rather than denounce the Islamofascist threat that any US senator would been aware of from his briefings. He has connections to, and in fact owes much of his political start, to Weatherman Ayres – thus his wife’s 60’s radical getup in the cartoon. Also, I’d imagine, her college thesis & collection of revealing misstatements are being spoofed by the cartoonist. Several terrorist leaders in the middle east have expressed their hopes for his election – thus the Osama portrait over the mantle. The flag pin flap & Michele’s “first time I’m proud of my country” pronouncement account for the burning flag. It’s clearly satire – bold exaggeration of actions or statements of the Obamas. But I don’t see what is racist about the cartoon.</p>
<p>As far as National Review covers, they are famous for spoofing their own, as well. I remember Donald Rumsfeld depicted in a Betty Grable pin-up pose. Newt Gingrich as a Hannibal-type conqueror riding an elephant, and dozens of others.</p>
<p>Oh, don’t worry. That won’t stop the Barack Hussein Obama campaign from trotting out Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Donna Brazille on CNN to cry “racism” about the magazine cover and anyone who doesn’t contribute to the campaign today.</p>
<p>Perhaps I am not familiar with the entire story, but based on the information I have her crime was not embezzlement. That would be an interesting assertion, anyway, as it was her family’s money which funded the organization. I read that she diverted prescriptions and medicines so that she could use without getting caught. Besides, no one said that an addicted person HAS to commit a crime, but they often do (and it is a part of the disease).</p>
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<p>I believe that there is substance abuse treatment in prison, but your implication is completely correct. Wealthier people get better and more effective treatment (of course, even they end up in prison sometimes, and sometimes for them or for anyone it can be the only real “bottom” harsh enough to inspire a real fight against the disease). Still, only a fraction of those who need treatment for the disease ever get it, and this is a crime (and an enormous contributor to any number of societal problems). The reason why so little money goes to addiction research and treatment is because of the stigma associated with the disease. I will watch the way Cindy McCain is treated, and hope to see things changing through her path in the public eye.</p>
<p>*A few of those Democrats facing tough races already have signaled their ambivalence toward Sen. Obama, the Democratic candidate. Florida’s Tim Mahoney, who won his West Palm Beach seat in 2006 after the district’s long-serving Republican congressman resigned amid a congressional-page scandal, is “supportive” of Sen. Obama, the congressman’s spokeswoman said.</p>
<p>But Rep. Mahoney hasn’t endorsed him for president and isn’t going to the convention, where he has a superdelegate vote, she added. “He’s focused on work in the district.”</p>
<p>Mississippi’s Travis Childers, who won a special election this spring to fill a historically Republican House seat, “hasn’t had time to be concerned with presidential politics” and won’t be going to the Democratic convention, his spokesman said. A conservative advocacy group campaigned against him during the special election by trying to tie him to Sen. Obama and tax increases it said the two men are planning.</p>
<p>Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who heads the Democrats’ House campaign committee, said he is telling many of the party’s freshmen that “their constituents come first,” and that they should spend time in their districts instead of at the convention in Denver.*</p>
<p>And those of us who completely agree with the implication here wonder where is the targeted outrage? Where is the loud dialogue that would end up forcing society to support putting real money towards the search for a cure and for widespread, guaranteed treatment??? The ugly truth, in my opinion, is that when it comes to addiction most people want to look the other way and support a more attractive battle. Even when the community hardest hit is their own.</p>
<p>fwiw - if you go to newyorker.com and look at the cover online, you can click to see other political cartoon covers (of The New Yorker) by the same artist; you can set them up as a slide show. The other covers make fun of basically the entire Bush administration (main players), and there is one that I assume is making fun of Hillary Clinton. This sort of thing goes with the territory.</p>
<p>MM–at the risk of repeating myself, what to me is egregious on the part of the NY is their sanctimonious claim that they are *not *satirizing Obama.</p>
<p>This one is a good one. If the roles were reversed and Obama’s wife was in the maid outfit and Obama was sitting in the chair smoking a cigarette downing brewskies there would all kinds of claims about stereotyping black women as maids and black men as lazy good for nothings… Please tell me you think it would be any different. There would be a huge uproar. No one batted an eye over this one… (this has nothing to do with your argument garland)</p>
<p>garland, I read an interview Howard Kurtz at WashPo did with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, about the cartoon. Apparently Remnick thinks this WAS political satire:</p>
<p>"The cover appears, at least at first glance, highly offensive. What was the New Yorker thinking? </p>
<p>“It’s clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumors and scare tactics about Obama’s past and ideology,” Editor David Remnick says. “And if you can’t tell it’s a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don’t know what more to say.” </p>
<p>But won’t some readers see this attention-grabbing device as a slur against Obama? There is no editor’s note – a tiny line inside the magazine titles the picture “The Politics of Fear” – and it has nothing to do with the accompanying article on the Illinois senator’s rise in Chicago politics. </p>
<p>“If I started self-censoring myself and my writers and artists because someone might take it askance, I’d publish nothing that wasn’t bland and inoffensive,” Remnick says. “Satire is offensive sometimes, otherwise it’s not very effective.” "</p>
<p>pmrlcomm, you’re really reaching hard to compare your proposed cartoon to the one in your link. In order for them to be equivalent, it would have to be Michele in the easy chair and Obama doing the serving. Get It? The Bush cover was a send-up on the oft expressed sentiment that Cheney is really the man at the helm in the “Bush” Administration, not the President himself. An equivalent cover would have to imply that Michele is actually the power behind an Obama Administration, not Obama. But of course, since Obama is not yet in the Oval Office (and not likely to ever be), it hardly matters.</p>
<p>I know precisely what it was about. That wasn’t the point. I wasn’t comparing the symbolism of the cover as much as I was talking about how it would be perceived if you put different characters, in this case the Obama’s into the identical frame. It had more to do with the fact that anything said about Obama gets twisted into some form of racism et al.</p>
<p>Let me put it this way–if Obama’s critics are reveling in this magazine cover, and his supporters are dismayed by it, then the direction the satire was supposed to travel, according to Remnick, was not the direction it in fact did.</p>
<p>they erred in doing what they say they meant to, but will not admit it.</p>
<p>I think that garland continues to nail it, regardless of the fact that others are talking around the issue. Hers says it centrally. There is no satire or mockery of the reactionary or the ignorant on the cover. None whatsoever. Nor is it captioned, that I can see. No foolish figure in the corner making an a *s *s out of himself.</p>
<p>NYorker is being disingenuous, & contributing to the absence of constructive political conversation, rather than enlarging the conversation via artful tactics. They delude themselves. They are no more to be respected in this than Faux News or any of the major media outlets who have come to specialize in entertainment & sensationalism. Terrific. We’re left with electronic tabloids as news sources. Welcome to the ‘progressive’ 21st century. (I see such trends are somewhat duplicated overseas, as well, to my equal dismay.)</p>