There has always been indignant sputtering outrage over stuff like that. Just not always so much from people who imagine themselves to be liberals.

unless it's an offical morgue photo.

This hypothesis seems to have great explanatory power.

Gonna buy five copies for my mutha,
Gonna see my smiling face
On the cover of the Rolling Stone, on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

So Bush goes form being a nude model of self portraits to the Cover of the Rolling Stone. I'll be he bought five copies for Barbara.

I have too many other concerns of importance to worry about where Bush's mug gets posted.

tradition of missing the entire point of written and filmed materials, even pop songs and taking great offense at them, calling for banning and the works. No city in America has the history of hysterical censorship and banning of materials that Boston does. The term 'Banned in Boston' goes back to colonial times. Boston banned Hemingway, Odets, Sinclair, you name it, they banned it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_Boston

I'll leave you with Phil and Don Everly with a song that was Banned in Boston.

and a date insisted we see it in Boston.

It was not the same movie. It had been hacked to pieces to be shown in Boston.

Things loosened up while I was there and the censors no longer run the city.

they were in the NY Times or the Boston Globe, we are well advised to consider that history which endured for centuries and is not at all gone and ask, what work does Rolling Stone do which conservative types in Boston might wish did not exist? That photo was on the Cover of the NY Times, no less. Boston had nary a hair out of place about that.
It is selective fury from a city that banned The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (who later wrote for Rolling Stone) and on and on.

They disqualified themselves as potential friends right out of the gate.

Rolling Stone is not trying to glorify a terrorist, on the contrary, it's trying to expose the mind of a mad man, who, what, why and when

change to:

Rolling Stone is not trying to glorify a terrorist, on the contrary, it's trying to sell magazines by printing a deliberately provacative cover.

There is no high minded journalistic purpose to the cover. The article could have been printed just the same, with any variety of different covers - but they chose an air-brushed glamour shot. Why? Covers sell magazines - pretty faces, intrigue, and in this case shock.

I'm not mad at them. They're trying to sell magazines...and the editors get to live with themselves and their decisions.

But Come On! Don't preach that there is some higher meaning to the cover.

with the police capture pictures that were released a week or so after the issue hit the news stands, but no one had leaked the "after" picture yet.

... that Disney movies held great truths. Good looking people are heroes, ugly people are villains. They don't want those preconceptions to be challenged.

He could be any of our children's friend. You never know what lurks behind the face.

If they bothered to read the article, they might get it.

What does a MONSTER look like? Oh, yeah.

So much more exciting.

the insides, not so much.