Al Sharpton's anger over a chimp-attack cartoon

"An uproar is brewing" over a New York Post editorial cartoon, said Foon Rhee in The Boston Globe. The cartoon, by famed cartoonist Sean Delonas, "appears to tie President Obama to a rampaging chimpanzee killed by police" in Stamford, Conn. The Rev. Al Sharpton said the cartoon was "troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys."

You be the judge, said Sam Stein in The Huffington Post. The cartoon shows a chimp that has been shot by a police officer, to whom another officer says, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." The cartoon, "at its most benign," merely suggests the stimulus bill was so bad a monkey could have written it. At its worst, it's a racial swipe that compares the nation's first black president "to a rabid chimp."

"The New York Post always goes for sensation, for outrage, for humor on its covers and more than not it hits mark," said Tom Archdeacon in the Dayton Daily News. But this cartoon is "nothing but offensive." It plays off a tragic event in which the chimp, Travis, was killed and his owner's friend horribly mauled, and "the way I read it, it's flat-out racist."

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"Look," said Jonathan Chait in The New Republic, "obviously the point is that the stimulus bill could have been written by a monkey." It's a mediocre joke at best, but "Obama supporters shouldn't be looking for racial slights around every corner."