The latest cutesy cover of the New Yorker magazine has drawn outrage and indignation from liberal and conservative circles alike. It portrays a cartoon Barack Obama, standing in the Oval Office, wearing a bin Laden-style turban and djellaba while giving a victorious “terrorist fist bump” – thank you, Fox News, for enriching the national lexicon with that one – to wife, Michelle. She, in turn, is depicted as a gun-toting, camo-wearing, Afro-having, Huey Newton-adoring black radical. Oh yeah, and there’s an American flag burning in the fireplace. The art is obvious satire, summarizing in one image the various absurd charges the right-wingnuts have thrown at the Obamas over the course of their campaign.

Sadly but predictably, the professional whiners did what the professional whiners do best: got all flustered and offended at something they shouldn’t. In an age soaked to the bone with irony, you’d think satire would have a wider audience. But the hair-trigger sensibilities of the whining class should never be underestimated. Obama’s camp, for its part, said the cover was offensive to Muslim-Americans. The Fox News camp – the same people leveling charges that Obama is a closet Muslim and his wife is a radical black nationalist – said pretty much the same thing. (If you add irony to irony, do they cancel each other out?)

The public, both sides say, won’t get it. Maybe we don’t view the world from the window of our Upper West Side co-op while reclining in a Herman Miller chair made with sustainable-growth wood. Maybe we don’t have a Botox appointment next Tuesday to get rid of the worry lines caused by fretting about the polar ice cap. But, yeah, we get it. It’s another slightly funny cover from a magazine that has published slightly funny covers since it was founded in approximately 432 B.C.

Few things are as precious in this country as the right to make pointed and salient cultural commentary. Yet doing it through humor is apparently off-limits. Only a fool would take the New Yorker’s cover literally, but fools are apparently what we have in the media today.