Satire is a tough business

Speaking as someone who has failed at irony a time or two: Welcome to the club, New Yorker!

ABC News’ Jake Tapper makes a smug, predictable, finger-wagging point:

Intent factors into these matters, of course, but no Upper East Side liberal — no matter how superior they feel their intellect is — should assume that just because they’re mocking such ridiculousness, the illustration won’t feed into the same beast in emails and other media. It’s a recruitment poster for the right-wing.

Kevin Drum scolds the cover artist for not providing a useful frame that would have blunted Tapper’s smirking, classist assessment:

A few minutes thought convinced me it was gutless. If artist Barry Blitt had some real cojones, he would have drawn the same cover but shown it as a gigantic word bubble coming out of John McCain’s mouth — implying, you see, that this is how McCain wants the world to view Obama. But he didn’t. Because that would have been unfair. And McCain would have complained about it. And for some reason, the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame McCain is somehow seen as worse than the risk that a failed satire would unfairly defame Obama.

A +1 to Drum for coming close, though I think the failure here is more accurately (and more generously) explained by incomplete thinking rather than cowardice. The assumption that the satire would be recognized as such without providing training wheels for Jake Tapper was sadly flawed. But we all know that now.

It happens. Next controversy, please.

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