Opinion: Vanity Fair’s turn at a McCain cover
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To all those who wanted a conservative version of the New Yorker cover for the sake of fairness, Vanity Fair has granted your wish (online, at least). From the magazine’s note accompanying the ‘toon (after some inside-baseball-talk about shared offices, softball games and vague, retrograde Brooklyn-bashing):
We had our own presidential campaign cover in the works, which explored a different facet of the Politics of Fear, but we shelved it when The New Yorker’s became the “It Girl” of the blogosphere. Now, however, in a selfless act of solidarity with our downstairs neighbors here at the Condé Nast building, we’d like to share it with you. Confidentially, of course.
It’s almost exactly the same cartoon as David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer drew in the days after the New Yorker controversy -- it only trades in a portrait of Dick Cheney for one of Bush over the fire place, and a wheelchair for a walker. (The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder points to a similar -- and quite meaner -- cartoon from the New York Daily News.)
So is it a clever commentary on an old controversy, or a new controversy, or the same controversy, but more boring? You decide: