Posted on 07/17/2008 10:35:53 AM PDT by Incorrigible
By CONNIE SCHULTZ [Wife of US Senator Sherrod Brown, (D) Ohio]
Oh, if only.
If only I'd known the New Yorker would run a cover depicting Barack Obama as a winking, tunic-garbed Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as an Afro-wearing, AK-47-toting terrorist.
If only I'd known that Barry Blitt's cartoon would show the Obamas fist-bumping in an Oval Office where a portrait of Osama Bin Laden hung over the mantel.
If only I'd known that editor David Remnick thought most Americans would celebrate this caricature as harmless satire.
If I'd known any of this, I would have invited Remnick to leave Manhattan and tag along with me to a baby shower in small-town, working-class Ohio. Then he, too, could have heard one of the guests describe her toe-curling encounter with the wife of a longtime county judge.
The two women have been friends for years. When their conversation turned to the presidential race, though, all smiles vanished.
"I'm voting for Obama," she told the judge's wife, who responded with disgust: "Barack Obama is the anti-Christ."
"You don't really think that," the woman said.
Oh, yes, she did. Nodding her head, she added, "You can read all about it in the Bible. In Revelation."
Keep in mind, this is one-half of a prominent political couple in a county where they know virtually everybody. Imagine how many people she might run into on any given day.
Maybe if David Remnick had heard that story, he would have felt the same sucker punch of shock that ended my appetite. At the very least, he might have had second thoughts about running a magazine cover that telegraphs just about every ugly misperception out there about the Obamas.
To most regular readers of the New Yorker, the cover was simply a poke at ignorant and bigoted voters.
To many of those voters, though, the cover is proof that even the New Yorker "gets it." And unlike just about any other New Yorker cover in recent history, they will actually see this one because it has been plastered all over the Web, cable news shows and in many of their hometown newspapers.
I live in Ohio, but the New Yorker has been part of my life since I was 17, when I found a copy in our doctor's waiting room. I was a factory worker's kid who quickly fell in love with the magazine that proved, week after week, that there really are two Americas: New York, and everyone else.
I still subscribe to the New Yorker, still love it, and I think Remnick is a brilliant editor. But the magazine's willful disconnect from the rest of the country doesn't hold the same appeal for me lately.
It's not that I don't think the New Yorker had the right to publish the cartoon. I do. It's just that, for a lot of us who live somewhere else, it isn't funny.
Oh, it's a mirror all right, but it doesn't reflect the people it was meant to harpoon. Instead it reveals far more about those who still think it's clever to ridicule the roughly 10 percent of Americans who believe this nonsense. Those people are just "knuckle-draggers" and "morons," to quote two of the many big-city writers defending the New Yorker this week. They also insisted that people like me need to get a sense of humor.
"Come on, laugh," urged the Chicago Tribune editorial. "Lighten up, people," chastised Tom Meyer, editorial cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. We're suffering from an "irony deficiency," wrote the Los Angeles Times' James Rainey.
Maybe they're right. Maybe this current political climate has wrung the humor right out of me. But I'm so tired of people who don't live or work where I do insisting there's always a punch line to the ugliness around us.
Nearly every day I get e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim. The anonymous mailed letters are increasing, too, and so are the phone calls. Last Thursday I failed to convince a woman caller that Obama really is a U.S. citizen, and, no, the immigration department has not ruled otherwise.
She called me a liar and hung up.
Hilarious, I'm sure.
If only I could laugh.
(Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at cschultz(at)plaind.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
TYPO: there = they’re
Oh, yes, she did. Nodding her head, she added, “You can read all about it in the Bible. In Revelation.” What part of revelations describes the Anti Christ as having jug handle ears?
ROTFLMAO!!!
OK, now that’s funny!
I would think that a true AntiChrist could have showed just a tad more enthusiasm for the job than to have showed up for work only 143 times and voting 'present' most of the time.....doesn't sound like a real, serious Devil Incarnate to me, more like a generic hack Marxist who is trying to worm his way into the Presidency via the Liturgy of White Guilt.
If that's the best that the Devil can do, I confess that I'm not impressed.
Yeah, I agree. I was just replying to a post that seemed to be skeptical of the idea that a voter would think Obama was for real the anti-Christ (one of the Beasts) from the Book of Revelation. Maybe she did make it up, but it's certainly possibly true just based on what I have read with my own eyes here.
Do we get in trouble for saying “I agree with Jesse.”?
You know, that's really scary because that is exactly the way the anti-Christ is expected to appear.
To tell the truth, I don’t know how strong Obama’s Muslim heredity is, but I know he doesn’t want it laid out for public scrutiny. I also know that the MSM is perfectly happy to ignore it, just like it ignored Robert Byrd’s past with the KKK. Those facts alone, knowing how the MSM operates on behalf of Democrats, leads me to believe too much light on the subject would hurt Obama. However, I don’t really care, because whether he’s a Muslim or a follower of Rev. Wright, Obama would be a disaster for America, so it’s not like it’s going to change my mind.
The funny thing is that it's the way over-the-top fawning by Ms. Connie here and her pals that fuel the Obama as anti-Christ suspicion.
The reaction of his supporters is disconcerting to say the least.
Okay, I know the left is utterly humorous. Let me share a backyard barbeque story. I live in hip leftist Madison, WI - so there are usually seventy lefties for every righty at any function. When the brat buns suddenly ran out, several people were milling about:
Lefty #1:”Hmm...she said there were still some buns around here.”
Lefty #2: “Yeah, she said we’d find them over here, but I don’t see them.”
Me: “Buns you can believe in?”
Lefty #1:”What?!”
Me: “Buns you can believe in? ...and they’re not there?”
Lefty #2: “What are you saying?”
Me: (Going John Belushi - raising eyebrows in a wild and ludicrous fashion) “I said - BUNS YOU CAN BELIEVE IN?! I don’t see any BUNS!! DO YOU SEE any buns?! Buns you can BELIEVE IN?!!”
Lefties gather up their plastic plates and run off.
Indeed.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." - William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
When I lived in Seattle, it was amazing how many young people told me how they always wanted to live in "Brooklyn!, OMG, it is so cool there!" First of all, did they REALLY want to live there all there life (when they were drooling on their mom's carpet in Bellevue or Kirkland, for example?). Would they really survive in the REAL Brooklyn like Bed Stuy, or tolerate the coogines in the bars on 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge?
They go to their little bubbles in Billyburg and Carroll Gardens, and then (hopefully) go back home when they hit 30 and mom and dad stop sending a check.
Growing up in NYC, I always had plenty of neighbors and relatives who subscribed to the NYer (my father was a cop and we didn’t get it) so I always looked forward to the cartoons. When I became politically aware during my teen years, I remember trying to read the print that was between the cartoons. I did that once...incredibly silly claptrap (but I always liked the cartoons).
Now I know that is a lie because none of the lefties I know would eat a brat unless it was made out of shade-grown organic tofu!
This column is in my local northwest Florida paper today and it was the last straw for me. I called and canceled my subscription. When they asked why I was canceling, I told them it was because I was tired of the liberal columns that they kept putting in there. The person I talked to sounded like she’d heard it all before and seemed to be in complete agreement.
Connie is a blithering idiot. I bet she has fat ankles.
Maybe she’ll answer, as I emailed her a link to this thread.
She believes that only *she* and her ilk are intelligent enough to decide who should govern us. Screw that, and screw you, Connie.
The last time we had an ivy-league lawyer and his ambitious wife in the White House they came with suspect money (Soros), sleazy real estate deals (Rezko) and a history of anti-American associations (Clinton’s lost trip to Moscow vs. Bill Ayers).
Do we really want to go thru the Clinton years again?
OMG. That’s too funny. I laughed so hard all my coworkers came by.
Their Arts writing is quite good.
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