Obama: New Yorker Cover Real After All

New York, NY -- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama withdrew his initial criticism of The New Yorker magazine's controversial front cover illustration featuring the Senator and his wife Michelle.

Within an hour of the July 16th issue's release, Mr. Obama's staff had released a vitriolic protest of the caricature produced by Canadian-born cartoonist Barry Blitt, but the campaign's harsh words were soon recanted.

"The Senator's outrage was entirely understandable," said Mr. Obama's communications director Bill Burton. "He simply didn't expect anything like that to come from such a normally left-leaning source. Then he talked to Mrs. Obama and they agreed The New Yorker pretty much nailed it."

"However," Mr. Burton continued, "at no time or under any circumstance has Senator Obama ever consumed a human infant. He is not a baby-eater."

Persons without cable TV and an Internet connection or who would never look at or buy a print publication would appreciate being told the Obamas were depicted unflatteringly: he as a robed Muslim, she as a gun-toting radical.

At a press conference on Wednesday, a spokeseditor for The New Yorker stated the artwork's intended purpose was to parody the stereotypes and innuendoes that have been assigned to Mr. and Mrs. Obama; the man was then crushed by the elephant in the room.

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Senator John McCain attacked his rival's change of heart regarding the magazine cover's accuracy, calling him "fuzzy on specifics" and "a flip-flopper."

"He and his wife want to either undermine our nation's fundamental way of life, replacing it with a radical, Islam-centric, anarchist agenda, or they don't," Mr. McCain told supporters at a bingo hall in suburban Bethesda, MD.

"My friends," the Arizona Republican added, "Senator Obama has an obligation to describe exactly how he intends to fund the systematic deconstruction of America's social values and well-established democracy."

Mr. McCain also accused Mr. Obama of embracing the same old, worn out Democratic "tax-and-violently-overthrow" liberal policies but hiding them behind moderate, centrist rhetoric.

"His campaign slogan is 'change we can believe in,' or something like that," Mr. McCain said. "Folks, all that'll be left after my opponent's nihilistic, un-patriotic, free-spending first term will be pocket change. Believe that!"