The problem is that the cartoon accurately portrays a ridiculous real-life caricature that exists as literal fact in the minds of some people, and it portrays it in terms that are absolutely true to that caricature. An analogous instance would have been a cartoon without commentary appearing in a liberal Northern newspaper in the 1920s — a time when Southern violence against blacks was unabated — that showed a black man raping a white woman while eating a watermelon. The effect of accurately reproducing such a ridiculous image that dwelled unridiculously in the minds of some people would have been merely to broaden its vicious reach. The adherents of that image would have gone unsatirized and untouched.

Absolutely. So would I. Had to make a choice between USA and Oz. Life beat work but it was a close fight. The deciding factor was the mess of the INS in the USA and I dont like illegal migrants. No queue jumpers, please.

Melbourne Desi – that’s cool, all that moving around! I have a good friend and colleague in Boston who worked in the UK, Melbourne, and Boston as a doc and she says that in her ideal world she would live in Australia and work in the US. I always thought that was interesting.

The morning after Obama locked up the nomination, I was writing a “Trailhead” item that mocked the media’s difficulty in figuring out what to call the now famous gesture. “Fist-pound,” “knuckle-bump,” and “fist-to-fist thumbs up” were among the funnier examples, but one of them—”Hezbollah-style fist jab”—was particularly risible. It came from the Web site for Human Events, a hard-right weekly. Unfortunately, I failed to note that its provenance was not the magazine itself but a reader comment posted below an unrelated column by Cal Thomas. I linked the phrase to the column but didn’t explain that the words weren’t Thomas’.

Many “Trailhead” readers clicked through to Thomas’ column and, not finding the phrase there, assumed that Thomas or his bosses had wiped it from his column. What really happened, it seems, is that Human Events removed the reader comment after many other readers posted comments taking offense and/or debunking it. These latter comments remained, while the comment that provoked the outrage vanished into thin air, creating further confusion about its origin.

When I realized the confusion I’d helped cause, I posted a correction. But it was too late. Liberal bloggers from all over had already seized on the phrase. Time and Politico misreported that the words were Thomas’. Then, fatefully, Fox News anchor E.D. Hill jauntily paraphrased “Hezbollah-style fist jab” on air as “terrorist fist jab.” Hill wasn’t endorsing the phrase, but she failed to make clear that she was citing someone else’s characterization. She apologized the next day but lost her show anyway.

I recently saw the movie Clueless.

“I’m pretty sure that I’m the one who put it in circulation”

to call an Aboriginal an Abo is the equivalent of using of the “N” word.

Be glad that he didn’t choose his handle to be “boong”.

And one cover is as related to south asians/desis in America as the other.