'We all have to watch very carefully what we say'

A follow-up story in the New York Daily News on the by now-infamous Obama New Yorker cover has a couple of particularly egregious quotes. First, Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

"Mayor Bloomberg said he hadn't seen the cover, but remarked, 'I think we all have to watch very carefully what we say, our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people, because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage.' "

Yes, best watch those attempts at informing people! Then, of course, the self-pitying, malign Council on American-Islamic Relations weighs in:

"The Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a statement denouncing the cover as an attempt to 'reduce the [Muslim] faith and its 1.5 billion followers into caricatures of themselves.' "

Awww -- poor lambs.

New Yorker editor David Remnick is mystified, as well he might be, by all the pants-wetting on the left. "I published the cover not to 'get attention' gratuitously but because it had something important to say and to provoke a discussion," he said.

Indeed there should be a discussion, and it should focus on Remnick's invidious intent: to characterize Americans' entirely legitimate apprehensions about what an Obama presidency might portend as misguided and silly. John McCain was recently heard to say his opponent was running for Jimmy Carter's second term, but that wasn't quite on the mark. What Barack Obama is running for Lyndon Johnson's second term. When one recalls the lasting damage that LBJ was able to do with his army of congressional lickspittles -- the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the concept of affirmative action, etc., etc. ad nauseam -- this is a decidely grim prospect. It is that which we who oppose Obama fear, not a crypto-Muslim chief executive who's a secret admirer of Bin Laden.