True North

Four words most Salon readers never expected to see, but Gary Kamiya writes them in response to the Left’s reaction to the New Yorker satirical cover that has the Barack Obama campaign seeing red. Kamiya blames Bush — no, really! — and misses the effect of the political-correctness movement and the resultant intellectual rigor mortis on the Left. Apart from that, he diagnoses the problem fairly well, and blasts the Left for making themselves into a pusillanimous caricature:

It’s official: The Bush era has made liberals so terrified of right-wing smears it has caused them to completely lose their sense of humor.

Much as I hate to repeat one of Rush Limbaugh’s flat, stale and unprofitable applause lines, that’s the only conclusion I can draw after witnessing the left-wing blogosphere’s bizarre reaction to the New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama in the Oval Office as a dishdasha-clad Muslim terrorist, exchanging a “terrorist fist jab” with Michelle Obama, who is dressed like a latter-day Angela Davis with huge ‘fro, combat boots, assault rifle and bandolier of bullets — while Osama bin Laden looks approvingly on from a picture frame and an American flag burns merrily in the presidential fireplace. To judge from the reaction of much of the left, you’d think that New Yorker editor David Remnick had morphed into some kind of hideous hybrid of Roger Ailes and Roland Barthes and was waging an insidious Semiotic War against Obama. ….

Vast swaths of the left have apparently been so traumatized by the Big Lie techniques employed by the Bush administration, its media lickspittles like Fox News, and the right-wing attack machine, that they have come to regard all images or texts that contain negative stereotypes as too politically dangerous to run. If you satirically depict Obama as an Islamist terrorist, in this view, you are only reinforcing and giving broader currency to right-wing smears.

Oh, where to start with this? I guess we can start with unprofitable as the jumping-off point. Perhaps it escaped Kamiya’s notice, but Rush Limbaugh just signed a contract that pays him more money than A-Rod — in fact, twice as much. Of course, Rush has a better batting average, as well as the taste not to sleep with Madonna.

Next, the idea that the Left became intellectual cowards because of the big meanies in the opposition rediscovers the irony Kamiya claims was lost after 9/11. He castigates the “left-wing commentariat” as “cowering”, but then puts the blame on Fox News and the Bush administration. Even if we accept the hyperbolic accusations of a “right-wing attack machine” (an accusation handily refuted by Kamiya’s own piece in Salon), that wouldn’t cause cowardice as much as reveal it. It doesn’t take courage to speak out when no one opposes you, Gary.

Afterwards, however, Kamiya gets most of the rest correct. The New Yorker cartoon was obviously satire, but it didn’t work very well. Satire usually gets placed in some sort of context; the New Yorker didn’t bother to do that. Its article wasn’t on smear campaigns but instead was a lengthy, straightforward profile of Obama. Under those circumstances, the cartoon would have been better placed inside the magazine with a sidebar on rumor-mongering in the campaign.

But it was very obviously a satire, and not a support for the rumor-mongering, despite the hysterical reaction Kamiya notes on the Left. As he says, if every satirical image winds up as somehow supporting what it satirizes, then editorial cartooning is dead, and satire in general is on life support. Most of us on the Right knew immediately that this was meant as a slam on conservatives, not on Obama (and an unfair one at that, seeing as how the dishdasha and the Muslim issue came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and not Republicans, a fact Kamiya neglects to mention). We didn’t freak out when it appeared, although we had a lot of fun with the reaction from the Left.

So, yes, Rush Limbaugh was right about the Left’s lack of humor, but that began a long time ago, when political correctness began eating away at free speech on college campuses and normal human interaction. As with the intellectual cowardice, this episode doesn’t so much create it as reveal it.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.