Mike Luckovich

What’s appalling me lately is that humorists and illustrators have the ripest material in the world to call out prejudice and bigotry, and they’re either pulling their punches or colluding with the haters to help undermine Obama.

Given the set-up in this Luckovich cartoon the NYT ran in the Week in Review, the threshold to hit the funny bone is to attribute the interpretation of a prayer rug, or Obama praying, to the prejudiced eye of the Tea Party crazies out the window.

The thing is, it never gets there.

Rather, because it pairs Obama kneeling down on the oval portion of his new Oval Office rug (lost a contact lens?) with the crazies excitedly exclaiming what only looks obvious, the cartoon is not funny at all. In fact and instead, it serves as just another example of the media serving as a mouthpiece for the haters, reinforcing the ludicrous but somehow increasingly fascinating idea that Obama is not just a Muslim but, in the case above, even some kind of Islamic Manchurian candidate.