Chimp-attack cartoon: Apology accepted?

Our cartoon caricaturing the police shooting of a chimpanzee, said the New York Post in an editorial, has created quite a controversy. The cartoon—showing the chimp’s body and a police officer who says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”—was meant to mock the inept stimulus. “Period.” To those who took it as a “thinly veiled,” racist depiction of President Obama, “we apologize” for the unintended offense. To those using the issue as a chance for “payback” against the Post, “no apology is due.”

“Cute," said Party Ben in Mother Jones, "anyone who's ever disagreed with the Post doesn't get to accept the apology. Dammit!" But even though it's probably true that the cartoon wasn't intentionally racist, it was "sloppy symbolism at best" for cartoonist Sean Delonas, who has a history of offensive work, to use a chimp to criticize the stimulus bill. President Obama has taken ownership of the bill, so "it's only natural" that readers took the drawing as a knock at him.

Please, said Michelle Malkin in her blog, "the only people 'offended by the image' of the crazed cartoon chimp—who clearly symbolized the crazed lawmakers on the Hill who passed the stimulus in a frenzy"—are Al Sharpton and the other opportunists who are using this issue to settle old scores with the feisty Post. "No apology is due to anyone except cartoonist Sean Delonas, whose character has been smeared by the manufacturers of grievances demanding his head."

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