Archive for the 'Larry King' Category

King and the King of Kings

Cidu Bill on Aug 1st 2008

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Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, Dave Whamond, Jesus Christ, Larry King, Reality Check, comic strips, comics, humor | 12 responses so far

Dear Mr. Obama,

Cidu Bill on Jul 16th 2008

Tonight, in what appears to be an obsessive desire to keep the “New Yorker magazine cover” story alive, you told Larry King that you personally weren’t offended by it, but it was insulting toward Muslim-Americans.

I’d like to offer you the advice that your advisers should have offered Monday morning: Shut up. And when you’re done with that, shut up.

Seriously, Senator, you are turning a non-issue into something that makes you look more foolish every time you open your mouth. First you let your “people” release a statement kinda sorta calling the cover tasteless and offensive, and then you go on national tv to be offended on behalf of the Muslim-American community (who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, by the way).

This cartoon was published on the cover of a magazine with a circulation of maybe three people outside of New Yorkers and New York expatriates. A magazine that supports you, by the way. And surely you understand that the cartoon wasn’t intended as a criticism of you, your wife, or the Muslim-American community.

You’re going to encounter some genuine slurs over the course of this campaign, and it doesn’t bode well for you if this cartoon can, to use a technical term, put your panties in a twist.

If you really felt the need to criticize the cartoon, you could have simply said, “Eh, I guess they thought they were being funny,” and left it at that. The situation would have been diffused — this never should have been allowed to become a “situation” — and you would have (as my son would say) burned the New Yorker: They can defend their intentions, they can put you on the defensive by suggesting you should have been savvy enough to recognize satire, but there’s no defense against being told “you’re just not as funny as you think you are.”

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July 14: Okay, looking at this week’s New Yorker cover… Isn’t it clear that this satirizes the various rumors circulating about Obama? Even if you’d never seen a New Yorker cover before: a few months ago they ran a cover showing Obama and Hillary Clinton in bed together, both waking up as a phone rang at 3am; everybody seemed to understand that the New Yorker wasn’t suggesting that the two candidates were having an affair.

Apparently this wasn’t obvious to either the Obama or McCain campaigns: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create … But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree,” said Obama’s people neatly sidestepping the matter of what they actually believed.

McCain’s people echoed the phrase “tasteless and offensive.”

So sue me. I thought it was pretty clever.

Filed in Barack Obama, Bill Bickel, Larry King, Michelle Obama, New Yorker, satire | 57 responses so far