This week’s New Yorker magazine pokes fun at smears directed at Barack Obama , but the Democratic candidate isn’t laughing.
The cover portrays Obama in Middle Eastern garb bumping fists with wife Michelle, who sports an Afro, a rifle and military garb. In the background, an American flag burns in the fireplace.
The left-leaning magazine’s cover neatly summarizes several smears that have surfaced this year: that Obama’s a “secret Muslim” who hates America, Michelle is a ’60s-style black militant.
And that fist bump, the modern version of the high five? It’s been described as a “terrorist fist jab” by a Fox News anchor, who later apologized.
The Obama campaign has taken aggressive measures to knock down these and other false rumors. It’s not amused with the magazine’s cover.
“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree,” spokesman Bill Burton said in a prepared statement.
