You Choose...Kitties or Candidates?

I couldn't stop laughing when I saw the two covers of the competing Sunday magazines that arrived with my newspapers yesterday.

The busy, patriotic Parade cover seems so overwrought when juxtaposed with the simple USA Weekend cover, sporting an aggressively not red-white-and-blue color scheme. And the staring kitten gaze. ("Look at his little face," as they say in the Mighty Boosh clip called "Kittens in a Barrel" featured recently on BoingBoing.)

Maybe the covers remind me of the well-known William Randolph Hearst line about magazine cover subjects... I think he limited his list of best-sellers to women, dogs and babies, but kittens make just as much sense. What chance do John McCain and Barack Obama have against a kitten?

Or maybe the two covers symbolize the absurdity of trying to have a serious political discourse in a country that is predicted to spend over $43 billion on pets in 2008 (according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association)... more than double what was spent just over a decade ago.