"Chicago Tribune columnist/blogger Eric Zorn gave notice that he is waiting for the magazine to launch an equal-ink takedown depicting John McCain as "about 150 years old and spouting demented non-sequiturs in the middle of a violent temper tantrum while, in the corner, his wife is passed out next to a bottle of pills."

Actually, someone who has maintained a little more perspective already obliged. David Horsey, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, riffed on the Blitt illustration with a McCain portrait of his own.

Horsey's image shows a drooling, wheelchair-bound McCain, singing "Bomb bomb bomb -- bomb bomb Iran," as wife Cindy pours dozens of pills from a vial and implores her husband, "Take some of my meds to get through the inaugural parade!"

Playing off the New Yorker cartoon, in which an Osama bin Laden portrait adorns the Oval Office, an American flag aflame in the fireplace, Horsey poses the McCains in front of a Dick Cheney portrait, their fire burning a copy of the Constitution.

Lest anyone miss the point, the cartoonist dedicates the piece to all those "irony-challenged literalists who were upset by the New Yorker's Obama-as-a-Muslim magazine cover."

That's coming from a self-described progressive who has put a world of hurt on President Bush but who said in an interview that he sees a disturbing "lack of irony or sense of humor" among some Obama supporters.

Jon Stewart regularly rides roughshod over candidates of both parties but hears nary a whimper. That's as it should be. The "Daily Show" host is, after all, lampooning a system overflowing with absurdity and irony.

Audiences understand those broadsides as satire but fret like kindergarten teachers when it comes to one image on a printed page. "It's like they need a flashing light saying, 'It's a joke,' or they lose the capacity to judge," Horsey said.

And speaking of judgment, how is it that Obamites, who are justifiably furious over threats to civil liberties under the current administration, suddenly want to play censor when the 1st Amendment puts their man even remotely on the hot seat?

If Barry Blitt is anything, it's brilliantly provocative. The New Yorker artist sent up the furor over gays in the military by playing off a famous end-of-World-War-II photo: Instead of a sailor and a pretty girl in amorous embrace, he drew two male sailors doubled over in a lip-lock.

A few years back, Blitt spoofed the idea of President Bush as a maid -- complete with apron and feather duster -- to the shadow president, a scowling, cigar-smoking Cheney.

In March, no one seemed to mind when Blitt had Hillary Rodham Clinton and Obama in the same bed (maybe there is progress?), both in their pajamas and lunging to be the one to answer that proverbial 3 a.m. phone call on some global crisis.

Obama's supporters are desperately afraid, and not without cause, that his image and record will be distorted."