The Obama cartoon, writes Brummett.
For goodness sake, it’s a joke about the laughable pervasiveness of ignorance and absurd rumor. The illustration doesn’t ridicule the Obamas, but our own fear and foolishness.
There is not one subscriber to that magazine – and there aren’t that many in the first place – who fails to get it.
It’s as if someone had taken all the crazed rumors about Bill Clinton – that he’d had people murdered in Arkansas, that he’d run drugs through the Mena Airport – and put them into a cartoon cover to spoof them, maybe with Clinton’s bulbous, oversized nose taking an illegal narcotic hit.
Brummett’s passage reminds me of cover illustration of just this sort on a variety of conservative political publications in the Clinton years, with the American Spectator leading the way.