“When I heard about Bloomberg’s plan, on the national news, to make large sodas illegal, my mind immediately went to ‘Are people going to jail for this?’” the artist, Owen Smith, told the magazine's Cover Stories blog.

The New Yorker has never been one to shy away from Hizzoner's more colorful aspects. Last year, the Mayor's ban on smoking in parks prompted this Bruce McCall cover, which shows New Yorkers in the stocks for indulging in salt or a smoke. And who could forget last year's Valentines Day cover? That one, drawn by Barry Blitt, had the Mayor mooning at himself in the mirror over chocolates and Champagne. (His birthday is February 14.)

Not that he needs take it personally. Mayor Bloomberg's predecessor Rudy Giuliani also made the cover three times, according to the New York Times.

Nice day for a white wedding!

We recently asked David Remnick, in a live chat, whether he'd considered running a gay-marriage-themed New Yorker cover after the state government's decision in favor of marriage equality. "I would not be surprised if there was one in time for the first wave of weddings," he told us, though the decision came down too close to press time to respond with a cover immediately.

This week's Barry Blitt cover illustration, featuring two brides strolling down the Brooklyn Bridge, continues a long tradition of (sometimes gay-)wedding-themed covers that The New Yorker summarizes in a blog post. The covers have gone from zanily buzzy--the neon-pink backdropped couple in 1994--to sardonic--the groom in white silk schmatte in 2004--to this week's rather sweet cover, with the bridge stretching forward into the horizon.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Here's this week's cover in all its glory, courtesy The New Yorker's Tumblr:

It should also be pointed out that the cartoonist, Barry Blitt, has had some experience drawing Spidey before. We knew this looked familiar.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Click for Scandal Report: And Then The Model At Diddy's Party Burst Into Flames

Click the cartoon to enlarge.

But "Observed" is in a class of its own. In this week's installment, maybe as inspired by Betty White's recent trip to the New York Stock Exchange as it is by Lady Gaga's baseball adventures, he imagines the world's most important pop star among Wall Street's finest. Click to see Mr. Blitt's beautiful stuff.

Mr. Blitt's cover, which ran in July, inspired a number of parodies. Now, The Nation revamped the image as "The Palin Trap," by Karen Caldicott (with cover design by Steven Brower). It shows John McCain in his Naval uniform giving a high-five (and his signature approving pointing gesture) to Sarah Palin, who's dressed in her aerial-wolf hunting camos. She holds a rifle in her free hand. The two stand atop a polar bear skin rug with the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall of the Oval Office across from a moose head and a model offshore oil drilling station with "Drill Baby Drill" written on its base.

In the fire place, of course, is the Constitution.

From Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, there have always been people who didn’t get it—or worried about the damage that would ensue when other people didn’t get it. Today in America, despite the rising influence of The Daily Show and The Onion, it can be hazardous to be too hip for the room.

Critics of the cover drawing—which depicts Mr. Obama in Muslim garb and his wife, Michelle, as an urban guerrilla, sharing a fist bump while the American flag burns in the Oval Office fireplace beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden—have called it “tasteless” and “offensive,” or in the words of one media critic, “highly offensive.” Evidently many Americans, especially in politics, the news media and the blogosphere, prefer their satire to be inoffensive and tasteful. But are satirists obliged to cater to them?

Other critics have sniped that the cartoon of the Obamas “wasn’t funny.” This is a matter of opinion, of course, but satire isn’t necessarily intended to elicit guffaws like a Jay Leno monologue or a Jack Black pratfall. Sometimes satirical drawings provoke laughter, and sometimes they simply provoke. Measured as provocation and as the focus of debate, the New Yorker cover is actually a huge success.

And then there are the critics who charge that The New Yorker, a liberal publication, has damaged Mr. Obama’s candidacy. Scores of angry readers reportedly have vowed to cancel their subscriptions in protest. But is the purpose of a magazine—even a liberal weekly—to help a candidate for president, and trim its articles and drawings to fit the agenda of his or her campaign? Not unless it is a wholly owned publication of the candidate’s political party.

Those who are offended, outraged and worried over Mr. Blitt’s drawing are certain that while they get the joke, some other category of Americans won’t. While they accuse the magazine’s smarty-pants staff of “elitism,” that term seems more apt in describing those who assume that most Americans are too stupid to understand the cartoon’s meaning and context.

As editor David Remnick felt compelled to explain, he assumes the risk that cartoons and art will be misinterpreted, either willfully or obtusely, when his magazine makes fun of racists and sundry blowhards. (He also assumes the risks inherent in editing a publication that wins prizes and makes money, thus inciting a degree of envy among peers who eagerly pounced on this “mistake.”) In this instance, the national controversy that exploded on cable television and the Internet ought to ensure that everybody paying attention will realize, if their brains didn’t immediately process “joke,” that the cartoon is not to be taken literally.

The inescapable fact is that both Mr. Remnick and Mr. Blitt are all too accurate in their assumptions about the whispering campaign that the far right has conducted against the Obamas—libeling them incessantly on Web sites, on cable television and talk radio, and via anonymous e-mail chains and blasts.

There is no point in pretending that this campaign of slurs about their religious beliefs and patriotism doesn’t exist. Certainly, that isn’t the attitude adopted by the Obama campaign, which set up its own Web site to counter the slurs. When 1 of every 8 or 10 Americans wrongly believes that Mr. Obama is Muslim, that suggests the right-wing propaganda is working. At least The New Yorker has prompted many commentators to acknowledge that such claims are “lies,” as David Shuster has repeatedly noted on MSNBC.

The Obama campaign is well aware of the problem, which is why they have adopted a counteroffensive strategy, including the Web site. But blasting The New Yorker in high dudgeon was surely a mistake. Even if they didn’t think the Blitt cartoon was funny, they should have laughed.

jconason@observer.com

Mocking the racial preconceptions that the yahoos have tacked onto the Chicago politician Barack Obama—whose first name isn’t much stranger to the American palate than Adlai’s or Lyndon’s once were—was Blitt’s really good idea. Our own front-page caricaturist for two decades, Barry Blitt has regularly been brilliant for The New Yorker: His “You Broke It You Own It” Iraq cover and his Bush-and-Cheney “Odd Couple” covers have become classics.

But apparently the cold discipline required to see the joke in the image of the new middle-class Mr. and Mrs. Ward Cleaver cast as Mr. and Mrs. Eldridge Cleaver was too much for American consumers made lazy and flabby by cable and Web. That both the Obama and McCain campaigns jumped in should be no shock—they’re mass retailers, and opportunistic ones, with product to sell. But the squalls and squawks coming from yammering New Yorkers is one more shocking sign that the ability to read a nuanced joke has somehow collapsed. All the gains won by R. Crumb and The Simpsons, squandered!

Have the culture wars so beaten us that New York has, at last, become Dubuque East? Apparently, when it comes to looking at a cartoon, readers have had their sensibility cortex bashed into a yam consistency by a self-righteous bully bunch that is assaulting a great American cartoonist as though he were … a Danish cartoonist.

In a post last night, Mr. Beam, who writes the website's 'Trailhead' blog, confessed that he may have accidentally set off the ridiculous Barack and Michelle Obama "terrorist fist-bump" meme that found its way into this week's New Yorker's cover illustration by Observer contributor Barry Blitt. That cover has spawned more op-eds, blog posts, news segments, and articles than, frankly, Media Mob is willing to link to, making it the most talked about magazine moment in history since Miley Cyrus bared her back in Vanity Fair, lo, two months ago.

According to Mr. Beam, while attempting to summarize some of more bone-headed misinterpretations of the Obamas' post-nomination lock fist-bump on June 4th, he accidentally misattributed a statement about the gesture being a "Hezbollah-style fist jab" made by an anonymous commenter the website Human Events with a post on the same site by Cal Thomas. Writes Beam:

Whoops! Add another footnote to the already too-long endnote about those pesky anonymous commenters and how they're ruining everything.