The New York Post's resident bigot funnyman has not drawn even one amusing caricature of Sotomayor. She is Hispanic, Sean! This should be a no-brainer! Is he at his desk staring at one depiction of her serving Swine Flu-laden tacos and another of her in a maid's uniform, paralyzed with indecision? Is he unable to draw a sombrero? Is he just upset that Obama didn't pick a homosexual? Who knows! But we are disappointed.

A "Curt Thompson" sent this presumably self-assembled cartoon to Weinstein, at his Military Religious Freedom Foundation address, without additional context.

The MRFF, continuing to solidify their position as our favorite foundation made up entirely of people we are kind of scared of, had this to say in response:

Mr. Thompson,

Thanks for your cartoon submission to MRFF, depicting a person, possibly intended to represent a person of Jewish faith (Mr. Weinstein?) urinating on the Constitution. At least, that is what you appear to be trying to convey - difficult to say with that level of draftsmanship.

If you had bothered to read the MRFF's mission statement and were able to comprehend it (let alone the Constitution), you would be aware that contrary to your cartoon's apparent intended message, the MRFF supports the Constitutional divide between church and state that has existed from the time it was drafted, and specializes in supporting the right of servicemen and women of all faiths or none to be protected from undue influence (particularly from superiors acting under the color of authority) in matters of conscience and faith. In fact, 96% of MRFF's current cases are self-professed Christians, with mainstream Protestants in the main, followed by Catholics and other Christian denominations. The other 4% comprise Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and a Sikh, as well as Pagans of various types, and agnostics and atheists.

It might also interest you to know that the largely volunteer staff of MRFF, in addition to Mr. Weinstein, consists of people of all faiths and no faith. Most are veterans, including Mr. Weinstein, (who was FYI an honor graduate of the USAF Academy who has 130 years combined military service in his family, as well as service in the Reagan administration, and elsewhere). Some of us with combat, including close personal ground combat, as in my case. (USMC [Ret], served in RVN 1967-68, Khe Sanh, Hue, and elsewhere.)

I will at least give you credit for signing your anti-Semitic screed. Most of the misspelled, poorly punctuated dreck we receive is of much lower caliber than even yours, and is unsigned, as most of the people who are engaged in these practices are far too cowardly to sign their names or give valid contact information. (Of course, that is understandable since most are indubitably physical and moral cowards, and most of what they send us is legally actionable under a number of criminal and civil laws. I think yours is probably protected as "free speech" - albeit hate speech - but our legal people will be looking at that aspect of it.)

I am not of Jewish stock myself, BTW. I am of Celtic ancestry. Other MRFF volunteers and supporters are of various ethnic backgrounds. So next time you take a crack at us (hopefully after you have completed further courses in basic drawing skills), please remember to include the rest of us as well in your ethnic slurs. For example, you could draw me with red hair and a kilt and bagpipes! Since many of Scoto-Irish heritage have large noses, you wouldn't have to change the nose much.

Normally, when dealing with sane, rational individuals, I try to represent what we are doing in more measured terms, but when I encounter obvious neo-Nazis, crypto-fascists, or KKK members, etc., I don't really bother with the niceties, because it only encourages the bastards, and is an exercise in futility, as only reasonable people can be reasoned with. As Twain once wrote; "Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig." I do hope you aren't too annoyed - I know I am at wasting this much time on you. However, if your lobotomy ever heals, and you really want to support the Constitution (although with your obvious lack of understanding or respect for it, I don't see that as likely), please get in touch for an adult and rational conversation - something you are obviously incapable of at present.

Very Sincerely,

F. J. Taylor
USMC (Ret.)

So yes, between this sort of thing and the defection of Specter (did you know there is only one Jewish Republican congressman left?) it is kind of amazing how quickly the far-right has just dropped all pretenses and is openly being all antisemitic again. It seems like just yesterday that they were pretending to be concerned that Obama would nuke Israel or something!

Update: Drat. It's just his normal day off. Nevermind. You'll be seeing his regularly scheduled racist, homophobic fever dreams tomorrow.

Last month, Delonas shook up his usual routine of hysterical gay-bashing, misogyny, and politically astute "all Democrats are Muslims are terrorists" analysis with a little old-fashioned (barely) coded racism. Oddly, his charming cartoon about a monkey who was shot after writing the stimulus bill did not go over well with the black community! Or "the non-asshole community"!

There were protests, and two apologies—a fake one from Col Allen and a realer one from Murdoch himself.

But besides those apologies, the Post didn't actually do anything. Well, they fired Liz Smith. But Delonas soldiered on, mocking Murdoch critic Michael Wolff for sleeping with a lady and for having the trademark Delonas "swishy gay-leg."

But on today's Page Six? Some other cartoon from some guy named Gorrell, who is obvious and unfunny instead of crazy offensive and unfunny, like our Sean.

Delonas' last cartoon ran on Friday, and it makes no damn sense at all, as it is about a terrorist snowman scaring the FBI, an apparent reference to all those news stories about the FBI being scared of snowmen. Right? So either Delonas finally lost his mind from the stress of people paying attention to how much of a bigot he is and is taking a much-needed break, or the Post actually fired him (unlikely!), or he just took the day off.

"No sane person would question his patriotism toward the United States or even the Constitution and the principles of democracy," Campbell said about Powell [accurately diagnosing his own mental illness in the process -ed]. "But his support of such things as affirmative action and Roe v. Wade placed him too left of center for the bulk of the GOP electorate."

So. Supporting affirmative action is just like being a literal traitor, which is what retired general Colin Powell is, for supporting a candidate who isn't in his political party.

Still, Campbell believes through his cartoon that race is a deciding factor in Powell's endorsement, having rendered Benedict Arnold with dark skin, and captioning the cartoon "Benedict Powell - Race Patriot."

"The only reasonable explanation for such a public political "about-face" in the midst of this important election is that Colin Powell, perhaps understandably, wishes to see someone who looks like himself in the White House," Campbell said.

"It's my opinion that General Powell has based his endorsement of Barack Obama on the color of his skin, not his qualifications, his experience or the content of his character."

See? Now you understand the reasonable and intriguing point this cartoonist made, when he drew Benedict Arnold in blackface and called him Colin Powell, because Powell endorsed a Democrat, who is black. The end.

Of course the Obama campaign will say the decision was made strictly for space reasons — it already has — but given the publicity surrounding the New Yorker cover and around Lizza's story on Obama's early poltical career, his people had to know what signal it would send to exclude the magazine so soon after the cover flap: That the candidate of change is not above trying to manipulate the press like any other politician.

Which, as the New Yorker's luck would have it, not only reinforces the central message of its cover story (that Obama is a politician much like any other) but also smoothes its potentially awkward transition from self-described "extremely favorable" coverage of candidate Obama to the inevitably more critical coverage of nominee and president Obama. Sometimes it's worthwhile to buy your own damn plane ticket!

For Obama, there is at least some risk of blowback from the decision. As Daily Show host Jon Stewart pointed out on his show last week, getting upset about magazine illustrations is not the best way to swat down rumors one is an intolerant extremist:

[Politico]

I've become accustomed to Gawker's racism [really? -ed] — from articles tagging black rappers with "HNIC" [that's the name of Prodigy's album! From an item about Prodigy! -ed] to videos of kids playing and adults having conversations with each other in Chicago accompanied by the headlines "Gun Warfare!" and "Drug Dealing." [Well, those were maybe a bit more questionable. We're charitable today! -ed] Sadly, I continue to return for the occasionally funny, entertaining and/or informative posts (which are becoming fewer and farther between).

We're so sorry for your inability to stop reading our site.

However, your coverage of the New Yorker Obama cover has been nothing short of appalling. The bloggers who put up the posts killed themselves trying to argue that no matter how offensive the images, artistic and editorial freedom justified any offense to the public or to the Obamas themselves. They even went so far as to add a third post lamenting the imprisonment of a Dutch cartoonist for posting sickening and degrading images of Muslims that lacked any political value and served no purpose other than to nauseate the viewer. When your bloggers are bending over backwards to defend someone whose images clearly demonstrate that he barely sees Muslim people as human, it is clear that Gawker has missed the entire point of the outrage over the Obama cover. This isn't about the New Yorker's right to print anything or the cartoonist's right to draw anything. It's about whether the New Yorker cover adds anything meaningful to the ongoing conversation about the Presidential candidates. It doesn't.

Let's call the images what they are: cookie cutter racist stereotypes pasted together onto a page. In the endless round of commentary, the Gawker bloggers and commenters debated back and forth on whether the images should be withheld simply out of fear that they would be misinterpreted by "dumb" red-state Americans who don't subscribe to the New Yorker. Aside from a single commenter (American Dreamer) not a singe individual recognized that the images themselves — a caricature of black and muslim people as armed, be-afroed and anti-American — are offensive and insulting. Whether intentionally or not, the cartoon mocks blacks and muslims just as much as it does right-wingers. Why not face the fact that the cover is not cutting edge or avant-garde, but actually reproduces the same old, tired stereotypes that have been around for decades? Taking a racist image and putting it on liberal magazine does not suddenly make it not racist. It's sad that Gawker isn't willing to acknowledge that fact in any way. It's even more sad that only one person in the Gawker "community" is aware enough to see this.

The absurdity of this is demonstrated by how different the blog posts and comments are on Gawker, as compared with Racialicious, Daily Kos, Jezebel and the Huffington Post, among others. Take a look and quit your snarky self-congratulatory statements about editorial freedom. When you've sunk so low that you have to justify your position by defending an image of Jesus sodomizing Mohammed, it's just embarassing. That is all.

This is the kind of condescending bullshit that does actually encourage us to agree with the idiots who think the covers are a problem because everyone else in America won't get them. The rightness of our position—that if people refuse to understand obvious satire because they don't trust anyone else to understand obvious satire then we might as well all pack it up and go home because there's no intelligent way to contribute to the National Conversation anymore, at all—is demonstrated by how different the blog posts and comments are on Gawker, as compared with Racialicious, Daily Kos, Jezebel and the Huffington Post, among others. No offense to those sites (well, no offense to Racialicious and Jezebel), but yes, we have a different position, which is that there is somewhere out there still a nation of adults. Adults who understand how irony, absurdity, and, yes, context work.

The entire point is that while we don't find anything edifying or amusing about an image of Jesus sodomizing Mohammed (except inasmuch as an image of Jesus sodomizing anyone is inherently hilarious), we shouldn't be throwing crackpots who draw such an image in jail. And furthermore anyone who'd equate said cartoon (provocation with no point other than provocation) with the New Yorker's cover (provocation in the name of getting you to think about your response to the image) in a blanket condemnation of both is dense and dangerous.

If the image is offensive, it's because the smears and whispers the image illustrates are offensive, and that is the point of illustrating all of them at one—both to call attention to these "dark imaginings," in Remnick's nice little phrase, and, by exaggerating them, to defang them, slightly. And the commentariat's outright refusal to get it is disingenuous and utterly unsurprising.

But in the interests of mending fences or building bridges or whatever, we've commissioned this totally inoffensive and not at all racist photoshop of Barack Obama, in a library, wearing a Harvard shirt, that we will use from now on. We wanted him maybe playing polo, waving a French flag (Happy Bastille Day!), and drinking a latte with his pinkie extended, but this will have to do, for now.

Photoshop Credit: Steven Dressler

He claims, like the anti-change Rethuglican that he is, that the cover is not even a satire of The Obamas, but rather a comment on "the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama's—both Obamas'—past, and their politics." That sounds like the sort of "nuance" that a responsible editor would know never to attempt! Why can't you be more like Rolling Stone, David, and only feature angelic photos of Barry as Jesus Christ?

This is saying a particular thing at a particular time, when these imaginings and dark fantasies and misconceptions about Obama exist. And we're putting it all together in one image and holding a mirror up to it and showing it for it for the absurdity that it is.

We look forward to this new era of political cartooning, when images must reflect precisely what the creator means without use of exaggeration or satire. Maybe the Mallard Filmore guy should do their next issue?

So far perhaps the funniest unintended consequence of this irritating flap is that culture warrior conservatives are suddenly happily defending the goddamn New Yorker of all things!

We hope the Great New Yorker Joke-Explaining Tour lasts for the rest of this godforsaken month, as there's very little else happening in the news.

Delonas [Post]

Context is everything in these matters, however, and what may seem at first like an irresponsible invitation to the unthinkable was actually a stinging indictment of what you, the celebrity-self-destruction-as-spectator-bloodsport fan, are reaping upon the sad and empty pop star husk Spears become. (Poignantly represented by a lower jaw standing behind a recording studio microphone).

• South Park