The NY Post ran a cartoon today from the controversial and famed artist, Sean Delonas. The sketch depicts a recent news story about a pet chimpanzee that was shot to death after mauling a woman. The caption on the cartoon says, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
Since Barack Obama is the author of the stimulus package, many people feel the cartoon goes over the line by comparing our first black President to a chimp.
Al Shaprton was furious with the NY Post and issued a statement:
“The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that “Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill. Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder are they inferring that a monkey wrote the last bill?”
After being flooded by hate mail, Col Allan, editor-in-chief of the NY Post said, "The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."
Is everyone wound too tight with political correctness, or is this flat-out offensive?
– Bumble Bee
I don’t think it’s offensive because he’s black, I think it’s offensive because he’s the President and he’s trying very hard to clean up the mess the previous administration left.
His ears and default facial expression are indeed a bit chimp-like, and that fact has invited comparisons before, but it’s one thing to lampoon a celebrity’s appearance and another to make unwarranted inplications about his intelligence or his very humanity.
If I am correct, Barack Obama is NOT the *author* of the Spendulus. The authors, in the end, are Pelosi, Reid and their fellow Congressional leaders.
That being said, the cartoon *IS* inappropriate for what it implies on a number of levels. Plus, it is just not funny.
i guess i’ll assume the role of the one who thinks rationally in that:
1. its common to talk about monkeys and intelligence not having one thing to do with race. gibberish typed out on a page that a monkey could’ve typed that – or the one about how you can put enough monkeys in a room with type writers and probability dictates one will write Moby Dick – or that its writers were into some monkey business.
2. Recalling MH fired someone for making a campaign donation to John McCain, would there be any controversy if McCain was president and the animal dead was the “elephant in the room?” of course not, so why don’t we just call this the “500 pound gorilla” after it reduced its carbon footprint.
3. jeff danzinger is still celebrated by the left in the NYT and WaPo even after he did an obviously racist depiction of Sec’y State Rice sitting in a rocking chair in a mammy outfit saying “I knows all about aluminum tubes” and he (white man) is still syndicated.
4. Finally – if this truly were inappropriate and distasteful, what say you of your (the leftists’) 6th grade reading level cracks at President Chimpy McHitlerburton? Or of Ted Rall (white man) who called Rice a “house n!gger” whose cartoons are still in syndicate?
So instead of worrying if our President’s feelings are going to be hurt, let’s read the left’s sorry attempt in defense of an truly racist cartoon (aforementioned Ted Rall’s “Condi as House N!gger”) from Kathie Kerr, a spokeswoman for Universal Press Syndicate
“The criticism of Ted Rall’s depiction of Ms. Rice obscures the fact that it is part of a larger, hyperbolic context. In the cartoon, Rall is clearly imagining unlikely scenarios that might befall a number of key people in President Bush’s administration. That he exaggerates both the language and the events is a time-honored tool of satirists. Anyone who takes it literally is missing the point.”
So, applying the same standards you use on yourself, the answer to Chris’s question about whether the cartoon is racist, of course not and anyone who thinks so is too unsophisticated to get our high art sensibilities as you’re too dumb to get the point.
Stupid monkeys.
History has shown that black people have always been likened to monkeys by those of a racist mind. I find it irresponsible and intolerable that a media outlet such as the New York Post would allow this kind of offense to be printed and disseminated – with no apology in sight. The current president is doing his level best to bring this country back to the stature it had before the last president screwed us into the ground. Which begs the question, where was the New York Post and its cartoons during the Bush Administration travesty? As a black man I am offended and I think the New York Post should be boycotted by ALL sensitive and aware citizens of this country.
It’s offensive because he is the commander in chief and deserves respect.
The SAME PERSON who created this cartoon has also posted homophobic cartoons in the past…
Why not choose a donkey (which if im correct is the party animal of the democrats?) While it might have raised a few eyebrows, people would have probably taken the sentiment better…
NY Post is losing out on market share and looking for a way to boost sales of their “rag” of a newspaper…
G W is the President who not only looks like a chimp, but in fact acts like one, probably smells like one too. He was throwing poop back at the American people for years and we stood there and took it. He needs to be taken down a peg or two himself and his crooked croonies , Cheney, Gonzalez, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld et al need to and must pay for their crimes , and it is my hope that they pay dearly and soon before they pull that old Reagan trick, “I have alzheimers and I dont recall that, sir” Obama is far and away a better man than to be concerned about this tasteless cartoon.