You’re allowed to laugh at Obama,  you know--Jon Stewart, comedian and host of ‘The Daily Show’

Yes, indeed, it was funny.  It was so deliciously funneeeeee.  Y’all know what I am talking about, right?  Honestly, I thought that what the Rev. Jesse Jackson said was funny.  You know, what he said about cutting B. Hussein Obama’s (BHO) “nuts out” for talking down to Black Americans and telling them how to behave.

It happened in Chicago about a week ago, when Reverend Jackson was speaking to Dr. Reed Tuckson, a healthcare official, when a microphone picked up THE REVEREND saying in part: “See, Barack been talkin’ down to black people on this faith-based situation.  I want to cut his nuts out.  He’s talking down to black people….”  Yeah, man, I thought that was funny.

But that cartoon on the front page of the New Yorker magazine this week was a lot funnier.  It portrays BHO and his wife, Michelle, standing in the Oval Office after winning the presidential election.  BHO wears his tribal Muslim attire: turban, white robe, sandals and all.  Michelle, in fatigue pants and combat boots, sports a combed-out Afro, wears a semi-automatic rifle on her back and gives BHO a “terrorist fist-jab” beneath a painting of Osama bin Laden that hangs above a fireplace.  And in the fireplace, the American flag burns.

As my cuz, Manuel, would say about outrageous dyoks: “Pare ko … Funneeee!”  Yes, indeed, it was very, very, funneeee.

But, of course, the Obama camp went ballistics over it.  BHO’s spokesman, Bill Burton, said: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create.  But most readers will see it as TASTELESS and OFFENSIVE.”

Nah, I don’t think so.  In fact, many readers have found the cartoon very funneeeee.  That’s what cartoons are for.  To make people laugh.  It was a brilliant lampoon, a bull’s eye, in your face cartoon of BHO and Michelle. 

All the stupid Hillary cartoons were okay then for the Obambis, but picking on their golden child is NOT okay now … come on, y’all, let’s not be hypocrites!  It was a work of art.

Ms. Elaine Miller, a retired professor who gives talks on political cartoons, said that “once you launch a work of art it belongs to the reader.  The artist’s intent is very interesting, but the reader owns the interpretation.”

And the interpretation of the majority of people of that cartoon of BHO as a Muslim and of his wife, Michelle, as the picture-perfect image of a terrorist of the 70’s was … right on.  The effect was simply funneeee!  Many people loved it. 

As we all know, a cartoon reflects and exaggerates reality, like one of those funny mirrors that you see in fairs.  Sure, what you see is NOT really the image of you … but it’s you.  In other words, yes, it’s true that the New Yorker cartoon exaggerates, BUT that’s what a lot of Americans believe about BHO and Michelle … y’all get my drift?

Asked about his decision to run the cartoon on the front cover of the New Yorker, its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, said:

“Obviously I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get attention – I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say.  What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imagining about Barack Obama’s – both Obamas’ – past and their politics.  I can’t speak for anyone else’s interpretations.  All I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama’s supposed ‘lack of patriotism’ or he “being soft on terrorism or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or the most violent Black Panthers.  That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.

“The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things LITERALLY, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are.  We’ve run many satirical political covers.  Ask the Bush administration how many.”

In other words, anybody is fair game.  The New Yorker front cover cartoon this week merely reflects what many Americans think of the Obamas … and if that offends you, well, T.S.!    

DO RETIREES HAVE MORE FUN?: Talking about jokes, what follows was sent to me by “tdb,” a fellow retiree and a cyberspace friend from Richmond, Virginia.

“Working people frequently ask retired people what we do to make our days interesting.  Well, for example, the other day I went downtown to go to the News Stand for the Wall Street Journal so I could track my investments.  I was only in there for five minutes.  When I came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket.

“I said to him, ‘Come on, man, don’t you have anything better to do than write a retired person a ticket?  Why aren’t you chasing crooks or child molesters … that’s out of your league obviously!!!’

“He ignored me and continued and continued writing the ticket.  I called him a ‘Nazi.’  He glared at me and wrote another ticket for having worn tires.  So I called him ‘Barney Fife.’

“He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first.  Then he wrote a third ticket.  This went on for about 20 minutes.  The more I abused him, the more tickets he wrote.  Personally I didn’t care …

“I came down on the bus.  The car that he was putting the tickets on had a bumper sticker that said: OBAMA in ’08.”  I try to have a little fun each day now that I am retired.  It’s important to my health!”

Funneeee!  Right, cuz?  JJ