Jason Everett Miller proved that where FISA divides us, poetry can unite us in the first ever TPMCafe haiku thread.  Now, at the risk of starting a trend that will make Time's Swampland label all Democrats a bunch of latte-drinking poetry book sniffers, I offer you...

The John McCain Limerick Thread!

I also declare that slant rhymes and syllable mistakes are okay for this one.  A lot of us are at work and should be, you know, working.

Okay, I'll go first:

There once was a man named McCain,
Dumber than dirt and older than rain,
He’s the first guy Rove routed
Way back in 2000
And he’s running for president again?

Okay, your turn.  And as the Irish say: mazel tov.

The discussion about The New Yorker’s Obama cover has revealed a lot of prejudices about people that seem to be shared by a good portion of the TPM commentariat community.

There are some criticisms of the cover that I disagree with but can accept as legitimate.  If you think the cover is tasteless well, that’s by definition a matter of taste.  There’s no sense in arguing about it.  If you think it’s not funny, well, there’s another thing  not worth arguing about.  You didn’t laugh.  It’s over.  I can’t convince you that you did.

But those aren’t the only arguments.  The big one I see is that, no matter what the The New Yorker’s  intentions, and we all seem to agree that the intention was to poke fun at the right wing’s caricature of Obama, that the cover is unhelpful to Obama’s campaign.

But for that to be true, you have to assume that the American people are idiots who won’t be able to understand a joke that all of us, on both sides of the issue, do indeed understand.  You have to believe that a factory worker in Michigan won’t get the joke that we all get.  They will simply see the cover on a newsstand or on TV and they will take it literally.  They will subconsciously, or perhaps consciously, process the image and then in November they’ll vote for John McCain because he’s not a fist-bumping Muslim terrorist like in the drawing on that magazine.

Obviously to make the assumption that your average American won’t understand a joke that we all understand is the height of elitism.  The irony is that it’s The New Yorker that’s being pilloried for elitism, or for being the voice of New York’s chattering classes and for just not getting that it can’t go around making whatever joke its artists and editors want to make because the rest of the country just won’t understand.

Maybe editor David Remnick has a higher opinion of the American public than we have here at TPMCafe.  Maybe he thinks that fully functioning adults from all walks of life are quite capable of getting the joke.  Maybe he thinks they’re smart enough not to pull the lever for McCain because of a cartoon they saw on a newsstand cover months before the election.  Maybe he’s giving people a bit more credit than they get from TPMCafe commenters.

This whole line of argument rests on the assumption that Americans are either stupid, easily led and confused or are, at best, not as smart as TPMers.  So who are the elitists in all of this?

We’ve probably wasted too much ink already about a magazine cover that will soon be forgotten.  But it’s been quite revealing because a lot of people’s arguments rest on the assumption that the average American is a flippin’ moron.  I really don’t think that’s the case.  I actually think that most people will absolutely understand what The New Yorker cover means – even if they only see it at a glance.  Those that don’t will probably not care about it any more than they’d care about any other New Yorker cover.  Very few people will behave as I’ve seen described here on the site today.  As for the folks here at TPMCafe – tackle the elitist in the mirror before trying to take on Remnick.