There has been a lot of conversation this morning on MSNBC about this week’s cover of The New Yorker magazine. Pictured below, it depicts Barack Obama wearing a turban and Michelle Obama holding an AK-47 assault rifle. An American flag burns in the fireplace.

Hendrik Hertzberg of the magazine appeared on MSNBC this morning and said the cover was an attempt to convey the absured rhetoric during this campaign that Obama was a muslim and that somehow they were connected with terrorists. But because The New Yorker never ties its cover to a feature story inside the magazine, there’s no explanation of this.

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” the spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive –- and we agree.”

Here’s an interview magazine editor David Remnick conducted with the Huffington Post.

UPDATE: Jack Shafer of Slate writes, “Only weak thinkers fear strong images.”  The lead editorial in the Los Angeles Times opines, “Let’s be frank. People sophisticated enough to read, say, newspaper editorials are smart enough to know that the New Yorker’s cover art this week — portraying Barack Obama as a be-turbaned Muslim and wife Michelle as an Afro-sporting terrorist with an AK-47 across her back — is a work of satire. But what about the millions of dumb Americans who will think otherwise?”