All of the hoopla about the New York Post's chimp cartoon being offensive makes me laugh. It brings the hypocrisy of liberals into high relief. Their outrage is manufactured. Crocodile tears. Anyone who has read a left-wing blog, or the comments from lefties just about anywhere, has seen the president called a chimp on countless occasions. Oh, not President Obama to be sure. President Bush. His unofficial nickname was "Smirky McChimp," or "Chimpy," or "The Smirking Chimp." Don't believe me? Click here. Click page after page. The chimp/Bush connection is so prevalent on the left that there is a well known blog named The Smirking Chimp. It is dedicated to, as they say under their masthead, the "dishonor of the worst president in U.S. history."
Personally, when I saw the cartoon I didn't think of President Obama at all. I thought of Washington Democrats as a whole. There was, for me, no racial component to the cartoon at all. It poked fun not at the race, but at the intelligence of the people who crafted (that's probably too generous a word) the "stimulus" bill.
If conservatives look at a chimp and see a chimp, but liberals look at the same chimp and see the president, what does that say about them?
Update: The New Republic doesn't think it was racist. You can see the cartoon, too.
But, look, obviously the point is that the stimulus bill could have been written by a monkey. The monkey doesn't look like Obama and is in no way suposed to represent him. And it incorporated violence because the monkey in the news story was, in fact, shot -- and the punchline depends on the monkey being dead and thus unavailable to write further legislation. Again, while it's a mediocre joke at best, Obama supporters shouldn't be looking for racial slights around every corner. So far there have been very few of them.
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