The cartoon on the front page of the New Yorker portrays Obama and wife Michelle as gun-toting terrorists, with Obama dressed in typical Muslim garb. The editors at the New Yorker and the artist who created the cartoon say that it is intended as satire.
They are obtuse in their assumptions. They don’t realize that hard-right, conservative Republicans are already a satire of themselves and are so serious about their ideology that they have absolutely no sense of what satire is. Have you ever seen a conservative, Republican satire? I haven’t.
The Republicans have a pre-conceived idea of the way things are that excludes completely any interference by the facts and the evidence. That notion just happens to match up exactly with the way they want things to be. It is as far from reality as it is possible to get.
The cartoon being as far from reality as it is possible to get will quite naturally confirm for the Republicans their prejudices and biases and their most dearly held beliefs that Obama and Michelle are actually closet terrorists, and that Obama is a Muslim. You can just hear them now, “See there, look at that, I told you so.”
The people at the New Yorker didn’t take into account the fact that when people hold unfounded beliefs for which there is no evidence, anything at all that helps to confirm those beliefs, which must be obviously false, is grabbed on to and held up as evidence to support those false beliefs. The New Yorker cartoon couldn’t have been designed any better to do that.
The New Yorker forgot that when you’re dealing with people whose intellectual obtuseness precludes satire, any exaggerated satire you give them will only be seen by them as confirming their version of reality.
The Republicans will view this edition of the New Yorker as the absolute proof of their unfounded beliefs, and will quietly sit back, waiting for the rest of us poor fools to finally see the light and see Obama and Michelle for what they really are. To them, the “evidence” of the cartoon is incontrovertible.
