Karen Caldicott's cover for today's issue of The Nation. Art director: Steve Brower

In a nod to Barry Blitt's now infamous New Yorker cover from July, Karen Caldicott has created a Republican version for today's issue of The Nation, featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin high-fiving astride a polar bear rug (you can see how she achieves her clay illustrations in an earlier CR blog post, here). The scene is, once again, the Oval Office, but Obama's framed portrait of Bin Laden (it was a joke, remember) has been replaced by a copy of the Ten Commandments. While Blitt's take was clearly ironic, depicting the right-wing smears that have circulated about Obama, Caldicott's cover, scarily, doesn't require nearly as much decoding.