Cheaky Bastards. The New Yorker pulls Sy Hersh, and their covers are establishment all the way. There have been four Trump covers, as many for Hillary, and curiously none for the senator from Vermont. This week’s issue touts a resilient confident Hillary, conveyed oddly as a bright eyed baby-faced twenty-something scrapper. Remove the band-aid and her eyes are very wide apart. Inside, the same artist, propagandist recidivist Barry Blitt, rendered an editorial illustration of Bernie Sanders as Icarus falling, semi-naked, essentially the same unbecoming pose he gave coverboy Trump doing a belly flop to crash the GOP.
Why is the New Yorker selling a bright eyed, androgynous Millennial Hillary?
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North Korea’s leader as a mere toddler -that’s rich. Kim Jong Un is the preeminent adversary of our Pentagon. This New Yorker cover is wishful thinking I suppose if also insulting to our own sense of shame. The New Yorker depicts junior Kim’s military success as child’s play, though he continues to hold Western gunboat diplomacy in abeyance. The old saw is that North Korea has been starved of economic prosperty owing to its regime’s unfettered militarism. Sound more like someone else you know? The US can’t house its poor, can’t feed its children, can’t rebuild its infrastructure, nor provide safe drinking water to disfavored urban populations. The US spends more on war than everyone else put together. It can’t provide healthcare. Even Kim Jong Un can do that. Likewise Un doesn’t start wars, or expend ordnance to require the manufacture of more. North Korea’s war footing isn’t our capitalist sinkhole for weapons industry profiteers. That baby with the warheads would be better played by an average American preadolescent, shortly to be a PTSD’d amputee. 
The New Yorker Magazine’s MLK Day issue has everyone upset. It’s not that there are no women in the march, sorry. That’s another issue. Marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are now iconic men of color whose lynchings have sparked recent protests. There’s Eric, Trayvon, Michael, and …WTF, one of the NYC cops whose murder might be attributable to the unrest. Maybe. But it wasn’t due to his race. To the elite, these lives may be equivalent, and to hell with #BlackLivesMatter. One of these things doesn’t belong here, one of these things just isn’t the same. One of these things killed all the other, including Martin. WHICH OF THESE MARCHERS WASN’T KILLED BY A COP, WANNABE-COP, OR THE US GOVERNMENT?
There are two qualities about the New Yorker I find irresistible though I’m loath to praise any part of the established press. No matter how suddenly forthright or honorable their editorial might appear, it’s only a feint. The Grey Lady NYT for example, has expressed accord with Wall Street’s recent invaders, but otherwise will spew at best neoliberal subterfuge. The WSJ will only ever be Murdoch pretending. But I have the suspicion that some artsy pretense prevents the New Yorker from bowing to the corporatist agenda. It’s the usual PUP on Israel of course, but too elitist for bourgeois self-deceit. That’s my theory. As a result the most disturbing investigative journalism leaks regularly through its pages. It competes with Harper’s among very few, but where the New Yorker has no peer is its cover art, which is often surprisingly subversive. The