Obama gave a speech on Iraq today. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but judging from this description it sounds well worth checking out.
Chilling, indeed
Bush Adm. continues to have memory problems. Must be something in the water!
The Terrorist Watch List now includes a million people. That's a lot of terrorists!
Zakaria intv's Obama, even going so far as to ask intelligent questions
Digby on that New Yorker cover:Chilling, indeed
Bush Adm. continues to have memory problems. Must be something in the water!
The Terrorist Watch List now includes a million people. That's a lot of terrorists!
There is a lot of chatter today about the New Yorker cover, which is pleasing, I'm sure, to both the magazine and the right wingers. My feeling is that it isn't particularly creative satire and doesn't really ring true or make anyone think, which is the hallmark of great satire. It's especially disappointing since the New Yorker has the best cartoons in the world and could have done something so much better.
Having said that, I think it does bring up one of the subtexts of this campaign that nobody's talked much about yet, even in this brouhaha. In the cartoon you see the "muslim" Obama and the "black militant" Michelle fist bumping. What's the relationship there? Why would they be married to one another?
I've been wondering since 9/11 when the right would get around to conflating the Muslim terrorists with "black Muslims" and I think it may have finally happened in the couple of Barack and Michelle Obama. It would seem odd that the right wingers would smear him as being muslim. He's black, not arab, and it doesn't fit the stereotype. But it does fit the stereotype of the Farrakhan type of militant black muslims and that's what they're getting at with this. The image of the dangerous black radical is the purpose of the muslim smear, not the terrorist association. It's good old, All American racism.
This whisper campaign is just a message to racists that they can safely use the muslim/militant tag to explain why they can't vote for a black man. The New Yorker cover snidely laughs at these silly rubes who believe such silly things, but it misses the point entirely. Those rubes know exactly what they are doing. I'm afraid the joke's on us.
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