Barack Obama’s campaign spokesman Bill Burton is calling that week’s New Yorker cover art “tasteless and offensive.” The illustration by Barry Blitt depicts the Illinois senator in the Oval Office wearing traditional Muslim garb while doing a “terrorist fist jab” with his wife Michelle, who is dressed in fatigues, with an Afro and an AK-47 slung by her shoulder. To total the scene, there’s a portrait of Bin Laden by the fireplace, in which an American flag is ablaze.

The Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney asked Blitt whether “in retrospect, given the outcry, is he glad he made the art?” Blitt’s reply: “Retrospect? Outcry? The magazine just came out ten minutes ago, at least give me a few days to decide whether to regret it or not… I think the

concept that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in positive sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick is defending the cover, which is accompanied by a faraway 18 page spread about Obama’s sharp-elbowed rise through the Chicago Democratic political machine. Remnick tells the Daily News the cover “satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign… It is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a reflect to the absurd. And that’s the spirit of that cover.”

Is the New Yorker cover of the Obamas offensive?
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Original post by John Del Signore