Vanity Fair has a clone of the New Yorker cover, this time about John and Cindy McCain and functioning orthogonally to the original. Whereas that was a parody of the right-wing whisper campaign, this is the left-wing whisper campaign, somehow made acceptable (or speakable-in-public) by the controversy over the New Yorker cover. Because it reflects its audience's shared understanding of reality, as opposed to mocking someone else's caricature of it, this cover is significantly nastier than the first, and, I think, even less effective, ranking about as high as a Family Guy let's-remember-together gag on the Laff Meter.
I actually like what Gawker has to say about it:
As you can see, it's like taking the square root of comic failure. Not only is McCain not depicted as a caricature of feverish political imagination (he doesn't look half bad here, really), but there's hardly an exaggerated element in the pic, save perhaps the burning Constitution in the fireplace.
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