There Are No Words

[filkertom]

Okay, there are a lot of words. But this political cartoon, from today's New York Post, is beyond the beyond.

I mean, What. The. Fuck.

Comments

It's bad, but

[capplor.livejournal.com]

as many folk (ahem) that were referring to the previous president as "Chimpy", any protests will be waved off as, "They can't take what they dish out".

I'm hoping for "living well is the best revenge".

So, I'm reading Larry Gronick's Cartoon History of the United States" and came to a page about Thomas Jefferson

For years, the federalists had been trying to hold back the democratic tide. Jefferson they viewed as a radical ... an atheeist ... a friend of the French revolution, which had made politics synonymous with decapitation ... a dreamer whose policies were based on the hallucination of equality. The "Fire-breathing Salamander," they called him. -- And now he was president.

And what did this fire-eater do? Cut taxes, paid off the debt, and doubled the country's territory -- peacefully.

The similarities to highlight, I shall leave as an exercise for the students.

Re: It's bad, but

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

Thank you for bringing that up. I needed to read something like that.

Re: It's bad, but

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Does this mean Obama's going to buy Canada and bring it into the Union? :-)

Re: It's bad, but

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but, no. We called -- CALL -- Dubya "Chimpy" because of his actions. He likened him to a badly-trained chimpanzee; we made jokes about the Monkey King. But there is far too much baggage of referring to a black man as a monkey for this to be "can't take what they dish out".

Re: It's bad, but

[beldar.livejournal.com]

So, this can be defended as "joking about shooting the president (whether it be Chimp Bush or Chimp Obama) is OK?"

Had this cartoon been posted to the "bush is chimp" website last year, there would be nothing but calls for some lib'ral to be sent to Gitmo for it.

[joshuwain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, just ... plain ... "Wow".

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

Gah. Wtf is right.

[mimiheart.livejournal.com]

This.

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

Jesus frakking Christ. I've seen the racism in allegedly-post-racial America come crawling out of the woodworks lately, but this is beyond disgusting. I am physically ill.

[ionicaq.livejournal.com]

Totally OT, but your icon is amazing!

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

Um. Wow.

At best, it's brutal and brutally racist. At worst, it's an incitement to assassination. In either case, it has all the WTF for the morning.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Are you really surprised? Everything Obama has done for the past two years has been interpreted by them as evidence of either uppity elitism or simian heritage. The only reason Republican Senators are not doing the same openly and proudly is that a majority of the public will not respond positively to it.

The only thing that would surprise me from the right wing would be if they said or did something decent, ever.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

I called the previous president a "chimp" plenty of times. I have no right to say boo about this.

Has there been some kind of ape-shooting incident in one of the NYC area zoos, that this should crop up now?

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

Yes, there has.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/02/17/2009-02-17_911_tape_captures_chimpanzee_owners_horr-2.html

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

Okay. I saw it as a reference to the chimpanzee attack this week being a not so subtle comparison to the stimulus package. In other words "this bill reads like it was written by a whacked out chimp."

Besides, last I checked the President didn't write the package.

(Bryan braces for the inevitable "Then you're a racist!" attack)

As I said

[capplor.livejournal.com]

between "plausible deniability" and often depicting the previous president as a chimp, no amount of outrage on the left will have any impact.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Yep. The Post demonstrates once again how classy an act it, and its owner Rupert Murdoch (and his NewsCorp) are. To wit, not at all.

[rook543.livejournal.com]

Let the dead rest! Chimps everywhere should be appalled that one would think that the stimulus bill could have been written by chimps.

Only our esteemed senators & congressmen could come up with something like that.

[poly-scott.livejournal.com]

I'm glad this was published. I hope that Repuglicans keep shoving America's noses in their shit all the while proclaiming it roses. I hope they continue to do that, until not a single one of them holds office.

Perhaps we can setup a colony for them on the moon, and then stop shipping them food, water, and oxygen? Tell them they should live up to their own rhetoric about being self sufficient.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

No, we don't want them up there. Too easy to throw rocks at us. See Robert A. Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

[pagawne.livejournal.com]

That is just plain disgusting.

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

The truly sad thing is, if the Stimulus Plan does wind up improving things...

And I do mean "if"...

All these right-wing shills who are now calling it "doomed to fail" and "a disaster waiting to happen" will turn right around and claim "it only worked because of Republican modifications".

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

If this was just a one-shot cartoon I don't think it would have generated this much discussion. Editorial cartoonists are just like everybody else, they have good days and bad days and days where all the readers say "What was he thinking?"

This guy, however, has a long history of racist, homophobic and mysogynist editorial cartoons (I remember one from long ago where he presented the idea that outlawing divorce and preventing women from taking legal action against their husbands would lead to happy marriages. *Sheesh*) who was fired or driven from numerous newspapers by angry readers before Murdoch hired him. When this is taken into account then, yes, this comic _is_ racist.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

In other words, this looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck.

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

And for a different kind of offensive, how about a Jim Jones reference?

[beldar.livejournal.com]

Wow. How many people has Obama killed or persuaded to suicide? I had no idea he was that deadly.

[beldar.livejournal.com]

While this is obviously a slam on the President (and how about the previous president, who started the big-money bailout ball rolling with billions handed to Wall Street with no accountability?), my first thought was, "which member of Congress or D.C. staffer did the writing; this is a bit heavy-handed to say this person deserves to die for it."

Had there been the context of public statements to the effect that apes must have written the bill (conservative criticism has been more porcine than simian, with the constant chorus of "porkulus") than this wouldn't have been so left-field. Did the mad monkey in Connecticut write the bill? Bad taste, muddled message -- shouldn't have been published.

[infinitemorning.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to accept that the cartoonist was not consciously trying to be racist. But, honestly, that just means he was so blindingly stupid that he completely failed to realize the potential racial implications of his cartoon, and, frankly, editorial cartoonists should not be that stupid. His other cartoons, from what I've seen, are also remarkably shallow, often outdated (oh, hey, a pedophilia joke about Michael Jackson - that's original), and not particularly insightful.

...sadly, since most of the editorial cartoonists working today do seem to be quite as stupid as this guy, I'm not sure mere stupidity is considered an acceptable reason to fire them.

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

The only editorial cartoonist whose stuff I consistently like (http://zone.artizans.com/browse.htm?artist=2) is the one for the relatively insignificant newspaper in my neck of the woods.

I never really got why most of the American ones were so consistently unsubtle, to the point where I see a lot explicitly explaining what the cartoon's talking about in a sidebar or something.

[archiver-tim.livejournal.com]

Didn't you all also hear the other story yesterday, the one about anger kills?

Turn of the news after getting 30 minutes of it, put on a Tom Smith and enjoy the day.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Tim, you might've just inspired a song. Seriously.

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

It's a tie-in to the chimpanzee who went berserk in Connecticut earlier this week, and had to be shot by police, after critically wounding a woman. I don't think the chimp is supposed to be GWB - it's supposed to be some random insane primate.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5g9uJIj0suS69aVYnNMu17G6hMP4g

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

When you have the context of some of his other cartoons (http://gawker.com/5155855/ten-masterpieces-from-sean-delonas) I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.