You might think that a tidal wave of denunciation would ensue if a cartoon depicting John McCain being tortured in a bamboo cage by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and another person (who might be George W. Bush) were to appear in a supposedly respectable or trendy publication.

You might further think that giving McCain's three torturers stereotypically exaggerated Asian features would only further fuel the outrage.

Sorry to disappoint you, but the cartoon involved appeared last month in Rolling Stone. As far as I can tell, what you are about to see has produced not a single ripple of protest (HT Taxman Blog via tip from Weapons of Mass Discussion):

Rolling Stone is one of many left-leaning entertainment-oriented publications to have gone totally into the tank for Barack Obama, editorially and "journalistically."

Here is most of the opening two paragraphs of the screed by Matt Taibbi that the cartoon above accompanied:

Full Metal McCain
Haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam, the one-time maverick has transformed himself into just another liberal-bashing fearmonger

Posted Jun 26, 2008

Evening, June 3rd, in a muggy, dragonfly-beswarmed place called the Pontchartrain Center, just outside New Orleans. ..... here in the Big Easy, John McCain has chosen this moment to mount his first general-election attack against the Great Satanic Liberal Enemy — who, as luck would have it, turns out to be a Negro intellectual from Harvard who's never served in the military. And this is supposed to be a bad year for Republicans?

You'd never know it from listening to McCain, whose kickoff speech is the same election-year diatribe that Republicans have been giving for decades, one long broadside against those goddamned overgrown Sixties weenie liberals who hate the flag, love the bomb-tossing enemies of America and are bent on the twin goals of ending the system of free enterprise and placing every aspect of our lives under government control. McCain pegs Obama as a man who wants to take America "backward," to the failed ideas of the Sixties. "I'm surprised that a young man has bought into so many failed ideas!" he says, to furious applause. Then, spitting out a forced, ugly laugh that he must have practiced many (but not enough) times in the bathroom mirror of the Straight Talk Express, he adds, "That's not change we can believe in!"

That's quite enough.

July 17 commenter "Desmo" at Taibbi's article (July 17, 2008 11:43 AM EST; currently second from bottom on first page) had this to say (expletives edited):

Matt, you are one of the main reasons I gave up my decades old RS subscription. While trying to denounce the "other" party you fall into the behaviour you find so troubling. The cartoon that accompanied this article is extremely offensive yet I hear zero (deleted) out cries from anyone at RS about it. Matt, you just another liberal hack who (deleted) about the partisanship in politics yet you have no problem continuing it yourself.

Note that McCain hasn't whined about the Rolling Stone cartoon portrayal, unlike thin-skinned, sensitive about his ears Obama, who felt it necessary to have his campaign call the New Yorker cartoon portrayal of himself and his wife "tasteless and offensive."

So how is it that the above cartoon portrayal didn't seem to bother Old Media at all, while they're falling all over themselves in going after The New Yorker's portrayal of Barack and Michelle Obama?

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters