The New Yorker: Unfunny Since 1925
The New Yorker magazine is probably best known for its cartoons which never seem to make any sense and are rarely funny ... kind of like TheCoolerKing*.
Their latest cover, in an attempt for humor or satire or relevance or attention, portrays Barack and Michelle Obama in an illustration featuring "fantastical images" that left the Obama camp fantastically offended.
The image, drawn by Barry Blitt and featured on the front cover of this week's New Yorker, shows Mr Obama wearing traditional Muslim dress, while his wife, Michelle, is dressed in combat trousers and carrying a machine-gun.
The couple are shown standing in the Oval Office, greeting one another with a "fist bump", with an American flag burning in the fireplace, and a portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall.
I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time, but in today's politically correct society they had to have expected the fallout.
The New Yorker said the cover, called "The Politics of Fear", was a critique of unfounded allegations that have tried to portray Mr Obama, a Christian, as a closet radical Muslim.
"The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall? All of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that's the spirit of this cover," the statement said.
The portrayal of the Obamas "fist-bumping" one another was a reference to a campaign rally in St Paul, Minnesota, back in June, at which the couple were seen to "fist-bump", an action described by one Fox News commentator as a "terrorist fist-jab".
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But Obama spokesman Bill Burton dismissed the cartoon, saying: ""The New Yorker may think... that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create, but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."
Of course, it's obviously satirical to anyone with a brain in their head, but remember that we're talking about America here ... a country whose current president wouldn't know satire from a ham sandwich.
How many people are going to totally miss the true point of the cartoon and only see what is portrayed within? For how many people (West Virginia, I'm looking at you!) is this going to be a confirmation of all of their fears rather that an attempt to mock them?
Most importantly, how many copies above current circulation is this thing going to sell before the inevitable apology and removal?
Get it fresh from the newsstands, folks, and stash it away for a couple of years when it'll probably fetch a pretty penny on eBay.
*That was crispy's attempt at satire.
ETA Bombs Madrid
ETA, the Basque separatist group known for periodic terrorist attacks through Spain, has had an uneasy truce with the Zapatero lead Spanish government over the past year. Initially thought to be responsible for the 2004 Madrid train bombing, the group was later cleared and has been relatively quiet ever since, possibly to avoid pulling down the international wrath of a West obsessed with terrorist attacks. Whatever the reason, it's not holding them back any longer, as the group claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack at the Madrid airport that was fortunate to have not done more damage than it might have.
"I want to firmly condemn this attack," he said, adding that Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero would have more to say to the country later in the day.
A Spanish Interior Ministry official earlier said two calls had been received by police, the first a warning, the second specifying the type of vehicle and claiming it was the work of ETA.
Twenty-six people were hurt, most of them with damage to their ears from the shockwave, officials said.
Police cordoned off the parking lot and began looking for suspect vehicles. Two officers involved in the search were among the injured, according to state radio.
The blast at Barajas Airport halted air traffic to the facility's newest terminal on one of the year's busiest travel days. The blast shattered windows, damaged several floors of the multi-storey carpark and sent smoke into the terminal building, forcing an evacuation.
ETA's demands are essentially a free Basque country, independent from Spain (and France, presumably, though the vast majority of ethnic Basques are in Spain.) The Basque region was independent from Spain at various times throughout history, though has been a part of Spain since the first Carlist war, where an agreement with the Spanish government to respect the Basque country's autonomy was ignored. Basque is a distinct ethnicity, with its own language, food and cultural traditions dating back literally thousands of years. However, even ethnic Basques do not monolithically support ETA or their goal of Basque independence, and their terrorist tactics are likely to scare away more moderates who might otherwise support their cause.
It's unfortunate that what appeared to be a successful agreement between the Spanish government and ETA has failed, though a look back on the history of Northern Ireland, a similar (although not identical) scenario shows that even towards the end of the conflict between the IRA and England, there were still occasional attacks. However, if that situation could be resolved then hopefully the one with ETA can be as well.
A Bad Month for British Terrorists
Justly ignoring the foreign policy "ransom demands" of Muslim community leaders, Tony Blair has been getting tough on Britain's Islamist fifth column.
In July, the enforcement of new anti-terrorism laws saw the disbanding of The Saved Sect and Al Ghurabaa. These were the creeps who famously protested against the Mohammed cartoons, with signs saying "Behead those that Insult Islam".
Both groups were offshoots of the banned Al Muhajiroun group, whose founder, Omar Bakri Mohammed fled the U.K. last year. He settled in Lebanon, but when the recent war with Israel broke out, he was denied permission to rush back to Britain. What's Arabic for "chicken hawk"?
In August, MI5 (in cooperation with NSA) successfully foiled an Islamist plot to explode ten passenger jets over densely populated cities.
More arrests came this weekend when police raided a Halal Chinese restuarant in London. There were two more, unconnected arrests in Manchester and an Islamic school in the south of England is being searched in connection with an alleged Jihadist training camp.
Perhaps the most satisfying arrest this weekend, was that of a thug named Abu Abdullah, a close associate Abu Hamza, the hook-handed cleric jailed in February for inciting murder and racial hatred.
Abdullah has apparantly not learned from the plight of his mentor. He oozed evil in an interview with CNN last month.
With a Channel 4 survey suggesting that a quarter of Britain's 1.6 million Muslims think the July 7th bombings were justified, it is clear that the country has a huge problem. Police are struggling to cope with the task of monitoring thousands of suspects.
How did the U.K. get into such a mess? For decades the British authorities have turned an blind eye to creeps like Abu Hamza (no pun intended). They overlooked fanaticism for the sake of religious freedom. The multicultural society they fostered, created racial and religious ghettos.
Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that Britain was "sleepwalking into segregation".
The chickens have well and truly come home to roost.
Tunnel Terrorists Nabbed
Possibly inspired by the Discovery Channel's entertaining programming featuring a potentially flooded New York city following a "solar storm," three men were taken into custody today to thwart their attempt to flood lower manhattan by destroying a tunnel.
Three of eight "principal players" in an alleged plot to blow up a tunnel between New York City and New Jersey are in custody, the FBI said Friday.
FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon said the plan was "what we believe was the real deal," a scheme involving al Qaeda members on three continents.
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The scheme was in the planning stages but was about to move into the execution phase with an attack set for October or November, Mershon said.
These arrests, if they lead to convictions, will be significant scores for law enforcement agencies who have been tasked with the exceedingly difficult program of trying to stop terrorist plots before they've been hatched. It also answers one question that has been nagging the minds of many Americans since 9/11, will we ever know if anti-terror law enforcement is working, since the government wouldn't want to divulge details of every plotter they caught? The answer is yes, since a "leak" in FBI, and likely other law enforcement agencies, is incapable of containing his or her exuberance at this triumph of intelligence and investigation and refrain from going to the press after something good happens. Not that I'm not pleased at the arrest of these people who, for whatever misguided purpose, seek to terrorize one of the areas in the US with the highest concentration of people opposed to Bush's foreign policies. But let's not go on pretending that the government is constantly putting away terrorists that they just aren't telling us about.