WASHINGTON, July 15 (UPI) -- How did David Remnick and his staff at The New Yorker get their Barack and Michelle Obama cover so wrong? That's the trouble with satire, of course: The satirists fall so much in love with their exquisite sense of irony that they eventually go so far out on a limb and don't realize they've become not funny but just obnoxiously offensive.

Remnick, ironically, has been one of the best editors The New Yorker has had in its modern history. He revived the magazine after a long period of drift and mediocrity. To his great and lasting credit, he had the unfashionable nerve and backbone to provide a platform for Seymour Hersh's fearless investigative reporting on Bush administration policies toward Iraq and Iran when none of the larger, infinitely wealthier and more powerful print and broadcast outlets in the United States had the nerve to touch those stories. But he may find he will be forced to resign over a matter of bad taste -- though a very important one.

The notorious cover of The New Yorker in question is, indeed, simply awful. It isn't funny; it is done in the style of unselfconsciously racist and vile political cartoons from the 19th century. It is offensive to any self-respecting African-American and to any self-respecting American Muslim.

The Obama campaign rightly and understandably condemned the cartoon as "tasteless and offensive." Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republicans' putative presidential nominee, lost no time in condemning it as well.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations warned, "These inflammatory images and spurious associations will only serve to reinforce the racism and anti-Muslim stereotypes that the magazine says it is out to challenge."