I know I am the 300 millionth person to weigh in on this (as usual) over-hyped subject, so I’ll be brief.

The cartoon was satire - humor that has the intention of making a serious point.

We all know Americans love jokes, as is evidenced by Comedy Central’s endless repetition of stale, cookie-cutter stand-up comic routines about airplane peanuts, as well as a panoply of TV sitcoms across the dial that all follow the same formula for ‘dialogue:’ setup-setup-joke, setup-setup-joke, setup-setup-joke. Americans also love a good racist joke, sexist joke, lawyer joke, why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road joke, knock-knock joke, etc.

But satire has never quite had the same reach that lawyer and fart jokes have enjoyed in American culture. And this is because to truly understand satire, the person hearing it has to think. They have to analyze what is being said, and they must be willing to be critical of themselves or something they like in order to see and understand the larger point.

So, the fact that the larger point of the satirical cartoon was lost on people comes as no surprise to me. What does surprise, me, however, is the stark similarity between the people (far too many on the left) expressing indignant outrage over this rather on-point cartoon and those who have expressed similar outrage about certain Danish cartoons in the recent past.

It’s admittedly true that the Danish cartoons were neither clever or satirical. They were rather obvious and heavy-handed, actually. But they were, in the end, just cartoons, hardly worth their own jihad. The New Yorker cover at least has some intellectual merit, but in the end, It’s also just a cartoon, and it’s also not worth all of the righteous indignation being stirred up around it.

In the candidates’ collective overreaction to these drawings, and in the American people’s apparent missing of the larger, satirical point, we are proving just how brutish and reactionary we really are, and how much we really have in common with both our neanderthal ancestors as well as our supposed enemies.

And we’re also underscoring how utterly cartoonish our political process has truly become.