“My constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures!”

— William M. (“Boss”) Tweed

The furor that has erupted over The New Yorker magazine’s cover depicting Barack Obama as a turban-wearing imam and his wife as an Angela Davis-style black militant complete with afro, camo fatigues, full bandolier and assault rifle resembles that heard when a dozen European cartoonists drew caricatures of the prophet Muhammad for a Danish newspaper back in 2005, and makes even less sense.

Reaction against the cover, which showed the Obamas in an Oval Office decorated with a portrait of Osama bin Laden and warmed by a burning American flag in the fireplace, outraged many Obama supporters and gave cable news reporters something to do for a couple of days while they ignored the real issues in the presidential campaign.

Here, as best we can tell, is how the shock and awe lined up, from the nuttiest to the merely silly:

Some bigots, the kind who keep sending out those mendacious e-mails claiming that Obama is a Muslim, got the chance to say, “Ha! Even The New Yorker admits he’s a Muslim!”

The most zonked-out elements of the far-left cited it as evidence that The New Yorker was part of the racist, right-wing conspiracy to deny Obama the White House. Other Obama supporters claimed to understand the irony and satire implicit in the cartoon, but sniffed haughtily that most of the great unwashed — the fabled little old ladies from Dubuque — just wouldn’t get it. Others got steamed simply because their man had been depicted as something less than perfect. It didn’t matter to them that the cartoon was satirizing not Obama but the people who think of him in the way pictured on the magazine cover — someone, somewhere, might take it seriously and the magazine should be condemned.

We remarked not long ago in this very space of the plenitude of irony in these times, but if irony itself is rampant, the tolerance for it is dropping like a rock, and so, apparently, is the ability to recognize it when it pops up.

The New Yorker magazine has justly earned a reputation as one of the most liberal journals in this country. It has also earned a reputation for humor and biting satire, though some old-timers have begun to grouse that ideology has seemed to trump the Thurber-White tradition for humor in recent years.

Those who characterize artist Barry Blitt’s cartoon as an intentional attack on Obama are simply nuts. These are the same kind of people who believe that George Bush helped plan and execute the 9-11 attacks. They are the left’s answer to the late Jerry Falwell, who thought 9-11 was God’s retribution upon an apostate United States.

The people who claim to be in on the joke but think the rest of the country is too dumb to understand it are elitist snobs who won’t get much more sympathy here in Denton, where our residents, students and teachers in our schools and universities sometimes read the same books and magazines that are read at Harvard University. Of course some people won’t get it. There are always some people who don’t get it.

As for the last category, those who just don’t want anything but hagiography written or drawn about their candidates, we guess we can understand their point of view, but we couldn’t disagree with it more. They seem to believe that if The New Yorker is the liberal publication it says it is, it should do nothing, say nothing, draw nothing that might present a liberal candidate in a less-than-favorable light, even to people who wouldn’t know the difference between a satire and a sawhorse.

People can argue from now until kingdom come over whether the Barry Blitt cover was good satire or not. We thought it was a pretty good send-up of the racist, paranoid thought that is circulating now about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee; others may have convincing arguments that it was not.

But to say that the cover was somehow irresponsible or racist in itself is ludicrous, and makes us fearful that we are nearer than ever to an Orwellian age that not only does not recognize irony, but does not allow it.