Question: which drug, or combination of drugs, was New Yorker editor David Remnick abusing when he approved the current issue's cover illustration:

Answer: as a former drinker, I'm something of an expert on the abuse of alcohol; I don't, however, know much about drug abuse.  My layperson's opinion, though?  Crack.  Or a very large amount of speed.  No: crack.

Seriously, what is this?  The New Yorker calls it satire; the Obama campaign calls it "tasteless and offensive" (and the McCain campaign agrees).  Well: okay.  Jonathan Swift, in A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, suggests that Ireland's economic crisis might be solved if poor Irish children were sold to the gentry as food.  A Modest Proposal is utterly tasteless and offensive in the extreme.  But the piece has endured for almost 300 years because Swift's satire is effective.  Satire is allowed to be tasteless and offensive if it works.

Does the New Yorker's stab at satire work?  No.  No, it does not.  And it's beyond baffling that Remnick or anyone at the New Yorker, a magazine which I read regularly, could have thought that it would.  Tasteless, offensive, effective satire is... wonderful: nothing better.  Tasteless, offensive, ineffective satire: well.  The New Yorker did the equivalent this week of telling a joke whose punchline involves making armpit-farting noises and then vomiting on the floor.