Top black columnist Pitts — New Yorker cover fine - updated

In the latest sign that the Stuff White People Like wing of Obamiacs has let its political correctness and lack of a funny bone, among various problems of theirs, run amok, top black political columnist Leonard Pitts says there’s nothing wrong with the New Yorker cover.

Me, I like the cover. It strikes me as an incisive comment on the fear mongering that has attended Obama's run for the presidency. Still, I understand why it is incendiary: Some of us will take it seriously.

At the same, though, Pitts sees how people got huffy over it:

To be effective, satire needs a situation it can inflate into ridiculousness. But the hysteria surrounding Obama has nowhere to go; it is already ridiculous. In just the last few days, we've had Jesse Jackson threatening to castrate him and John McLaughlin calling him an “Oreo.”

Add to that the whispers about Obama's supposed Muslim heritage (not that there's anything wrong with that), the “terrorist” implications of bumping fists, and Michelle Obama’s purported use of the term “whitey” (a word no black person has uttered since “The Jeffersons” went off the air in 1985) and it’s clear that "ridiculous" has become our default status.

Pitts goes on to say the country is largely “ignorant, irony-impaired and petrified.”

Pitts’ prescription is in the column; basically, it’s to loosen up and lighten up.

To which I add the hypocrisy that, if anybody has been condescending in this whole schtick, it’s the Stuff White People Like types for assuming that “flyover country” folks can’t “get” intellectual New York satire.

Note: They can. And they do.

As for the SWPL crowd, it is almost as if voting for Obama is their version of Rent-a-Negro.

That said, I’m going to give The New Yorker a bit of criticism — a bit of art criticism.

Barry Blitt’s drawing of Barack actually looks more like a young Muammar Gaddafi (sketched at right by John Cox of Cox and Focum) than it does Obama.

For that matter, is Obama really that mad about the cover, or is it more that he’s pseudo-mad, play-acting for the SWPL crowd?

Of course, a certain section of the Green Party goes even more ape-shit over stuff like this. I cut the GP more slack because it’s a minor party, but it’s got issues too. Plenty of them.

Update, July 18 People for the American Way is the latest Stuff White People Like group to jump on the bandwagon of either politically correct real outrage or outrageous-itself faux outrage.

Update 2, July 21: We’ve got more of both enlightenment and pandering on this issue.

First, the pandering.

Al Gore claims the cover is “way too far over the top.”

Hey, Al. Read Leonard Pitts, then you can talk. Until that point, you, as another Stuff White People Like type, can STFU.

That’s because, beyond your original incorrect comment, you seem to be calling for The New Yorker and cartoonist Barry Blitt to engage in self-censorship in the name of political Kumbaya.

Next, the enlightenment side. Oliver Willis more succinctly agrees with Pitts, saying “people need to chill the hell out.”

Besides, the Chicago Sun Times’ Richard Roeper claims Team Obama knows this is all satire anyway.

Roeper riffs on B.O.’s initial response to the cover:

When Barack Obama was first asked about the now-infamous cartoon depicting him wearing a turban while “giving dap” to his gun-toting, Angela Davis-fro'd wife, he reportedly shrugged and said, “I have no response to that.”

Now, that isn’t proof he thought from the start it was good satire. It may reflect that mindset, that’s all. But Roeper is probably barking up the right tree.