Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Remnick vs. Mencken

David Remnick defends the Republican wet dream cover of the New Yorker:

I think you underestimate the intelligence of the American people, to be quite honest.
H.L. Mencken's anticipatory rejoinder:
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
One of the fundamental problems trying to satirize the Republican view of the world is that it's too extreme to exaggerate. There's probably already an email circulating to credulous wingnuts that says, "Even the liberal New Yorker says that Obama is a flag-burning Muslim al Qaeda foreigner with a revolutionary for a wife." (Yeah, true, at a lower reading level and in all caps, but I'm paraphrasing.)

The medium is the message. Remnick went looking for publicity and got it. You think he might be cuing up McCain in Depends?

2 comments:

Mike W. said...

The New Yorker cover does not portray how most on the right see the Obama's.

I think Obama is scum and I'm against pretty much all of his policy positions, yet even I found the cover to be tasteless and offensive.

Although I will say that his wife is most certainly "militant," so they got that part of the caricature right.

lovable liberal said...

Michelle Obama is militant in the sense that she'll gun your whitey ass down if you set foot in south Chicago, is that it?

Yeah, right.