The reaction to the New Yorker’s recent cover cartoon is more cartoonish than the cartoon itself. If you missed it, Barack and Michelle Obama are decked out in radical garb. He wears a turban. She looks like a Black Panther. A flag is burning. You get the picture.

The image skewers some of the looniest and untrue allegations that have been leveled against the couple. Now you may ask if the cartoon is overstating the anti-Obama allegations, but the people who traffic in such nonsense know better.

To them, it’s more documentary than mockumentary. I’ve been the recipient of a few of the pass-around e-mails about why we should be very afraid of an Obama presidency. Some examples of the more popular falsehoods:

•Obama isn’t qualified to be president because he wasn’t eligible to become a U.S. citizen, according to the laws on the books at the time.

•A Maureen Dowd article says Internet service providers have tracked campaign donations to Obama from computer users in Iran, China and Saudi Arabia. The New York Times columnist wrote no such column.

•Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school (madrassa) in Indonesia, and his father was a radical Muslim.

•You must be black to attend Trinity’s Church of Christ, which is Obama’s former church in Chicago.

Need more proof? WorldNetDaily, a conservative Internet site of news and commentary, polled thousands of its readers and asked their reaction to the New Yorker cartoon.

Fifty-nine percent of them agreed with this option: “The image isn’t too far from the dangerous truth about the Obama family.” The second choice – at 13 percent – is: “Funny because there’s some truth to it.”

That’s 72 percent who didn’t get that they were the butt of the joke.

Go JUMP! in the LAKE!!! The Coeur d’Alene Press wrote an interesting editorial in response to a letter from a North Dakota woman who complained about all the pushy people she encountered over the Fourth of July weekend. Naturally, the paper instructed the city to take responsibility so that visitors can have a better experience, right? Wrong. It blamed Spokane.

“Those bumbling, shoving, inebriated oafs and oafettes? Wasn’t us. That was the drunken hordes who migrate to Coeur d’Alene from 30 miles west every summer weekend, holiday and any other day they’re being sought for outstanding warrants and/or child-support payments,” the editorial whined.

It ends with this solution for keeping Spokanites out: “Offer free fireworks and a little bit of welfare, and watch the magic.”

Throw in some random capitalization and exclamation points, and it could pass for a rejected letter to the editor here.