The July 21, 2008 cover of The New Yorker illustrated a view of Barack Obama that looks like it was designed by a dream team of Republican interests. Except that even John McCain’s camp, he of the Iranian cigarette joke, agreed with Obama’s campaign that the cover was tasteless and offensive.

Barack in what’s presumably Muslim wear, Michelle toting an assault rifle, the kids nowhere in sight (perhaps receiving anti-American tutelage at that moment), it’s just satire from the New Yorker’s point of view, a visual amalgamation of the perception Obama’s political foes wish to encourage.

“Is the liberal magazine’s latest cover depicting Barack Obama as a Bin Laden sympathiser incendiary or have people just not got the joke?” the Guardian’s deadlineUSA blog asked. “Scare tactic,” said Politico of the attention-getting stunt.

The real lesson may be not to judge this month’s New Yorker by its cover. The magazine hit newsstands today, with the cover leading into an 18-page look at Gothamist called “Obama’s sharp-elbowed rise through the Chicago Democratic political machine.”

He’s also not a tenured professor of religion at a private university with a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law, as Valleywag noted today. That’s not the Essjay the New Yorker came to know in a July 2006 article.

Radar Online gleefully poked the New Yorker for being fooled:

In a feature story about Wikipedia, it appears The New Yorker fell prey to just the sort of pseudo-truths for which the online encyclopedia is famous.

It only took the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department seven months to discover that Essjay is actually a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan who has never taught anything and holds no advanced degrees.

Jordan’s creative background-building doesn’t seem to have had an impact with Wikipedia or its founder, Jimmy Wales. The New Yorker said in its correction that Jordan has been hired by Wales’ Wikia business, as well as keeping his Wikipedia responsibilities.

The whole fake background thing wasn’t a big deal for Wales. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don