Anna Wintour's Classy Vogue: Miley Cyrus Unfit for Coverage but Asma Assad Was A-OK!

The NY Daily News reports that Anna Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue, has bounced Miley Cyrus from an upcoming issue due to the pop tart's twerking routine at MTV's Video Music Awards.

"Anna found the whole thing distasteful," a source told the [U.K.] Mail. "She decided, based on Miley's performance, to take the cover in a different direction."

Here's quick refresher on what Wintour— who backed Barack Obama in 2012 by offering a chance to win a free spot at an $80,000 a plate fundraiser—considered worthy of inclusion in her magazine's February 2011 issue:

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She's a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her "the element of light in a country full of shadow zones." She is the first lady of Syria….

Of course, when it became apparent to Vogue—long after it had to the waking world—that long-limbed, analytically trained Asma was married to a brutal dictator, Wintour didn't simply issue a mea culpa. She had the offending—and incredibly awful and grotesque story—taken down from Vogue's website. Indeed, the article now seems to be successfully scrubbed from the web overall. Because nothing says journalistic integrity like pretending a really misconceived piece of work ever existed in the first place.

I realize that people don't read fashion magazines (or the Twitter feeds of designers) for insights into world politics. And I suppose there's no reason to expect even common human decency in such forums. There may be no need to take sides or render verdicts on anybody else's editorial decisionmaking process. But it somehow bothers me to see the late Hannah Montana get treated so shabbily for a harmless (if dubious) performance when put in the context of what else Vogue has seen fit to lionize.