I know that the Righties seem to think that they do, but the old saw of “if you tell mom about A, I'll tell mom about B” is just as pointless and useless in adulthood as it was when we were kids.

The question of whether Bush was compared to a chimp is meaningless in this context, and only provides cover for one of the most blatant eruptions of bile and, yes, racism we've seen in a long time.

I'm surprised that anyone buys this tired old rationalization, but, sadly, they buy it all the time. Just see Michelle Malkin's defense of swastika yesterday, which uses the SAME specious reasoning.

Or, since you once misspelled a word, you have no basis to criticize anything that I ever write. (Assuming that you remain unconvinced.)

But back then, the media were hysterical about the near-certainty that Ronald Reagan was about to start WWIII, and economic woes took a back seat because the Democrat-biased media wasn't as interested. I was close to Ike Pappas at the time, a card-carrying Democrat for CBS, who daily railed about Reagan's unemployment stats—-neglecting to mention that they were diminishing from the Carter incompetency. All the hype about the current economy is only par for the course. Typical Dem hysteria to prod people into new Dem bureaucratic entitlement empires in the USG. And yes, the economy is in bad shape, ut anyone who lived through several Repub & Dem recessions since the fifties as I have, doesn't think it as bad as some—or at least it. And the Dem's flouting economics to force banks to give loans to unqualified borrowers—led by Barney Frank's “husband” at Fannie Mae, among others—caused more chaos than any other single cause of the current mortgage crisis. Let's drag Barney & Chris Dodd and Pelosi & Reid, all of whom blocked Repub attempts at reform of the CRA by committee machinations, onto the carpet.

In the meantime, Tawana Brawley lives and thrives in the sick mind of Al Sharpton.

But acutely i agree with what you surmised: On target!

” But each political side now has a football to bounce around. Some are genuinely outraged; some are not. Stripped away from the issue of the merits of charges of racism, the topic makes for great “hot” talk radio of the left and right, great ringing blog posts on the left or right.

And it’s so much more easy to rage over this than foreclosures, or stock market roller-coastering. You get more followers, more viewers and more readers with this then yet another tedious story about America’s economy sliding inexorably down the tubes.”

My initial reaction to the cartoon — the point that I got was the stimulus bill was a mess of a bill written by a thousand chimpanzees, somewhat akin to the Infinite Monkey Theorem”, that states that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, given enough time they will produce the entire works of Shakespeare.

Anyone who sees racism in the cartoon is LOOKING for racism to begin with – the same sort of victicrat mentality that pervades segments of our society. I see Wild-Eyed Sharpton as nothing more than a media opportunist who is willing to trump up any false controversy just to get his name in the news. Sad, sad, sad.

I'm a New York Democrat. I worked in NY politics for years and became finely attuned to racial issues and sensitivities. Yet, I made no connection between the chimp and Obama. None. When I saw in MSNBC that a story was coming up about the cartoon setting off a controversy, I said, “Uh, oh, PETA is coming on to complain about being insensitive to shooting the chimp dead.

Then, when Al Sharpton popped up, for the first time irt occurred to me that some might see a racist angle. Well, if anyone would see it — and promote it — it's Rev. Al. It's total baloney. You would have to explain to anyone under 40 why the chimp thing relates somehow to a black President. It's a victory for Sharpton and his never-ending race hustling that we're even talking about it. I'm going to stop.

http://thepurplecenter.blogspot.com/

Having said that I don't know if this cartoon is racist or not, considering the pet-gone-wild story. I would not have thought this was racist, but then again maybe I'm insensitive or clueless or both.

In this case I think one has to know the pet-gone-wild angle. If one doesn't have that perspective then one of two things will probably happen. Either that person a.) won't “get it” or b.) will think the cartoon is racist (with no other context).

Add in a violent killing (do you have any idea how much security is being prepared for Obama's visit to Ottawa tomorrow) AND add in the dismay felt by Post staffers AND add in the fact that the facing page to this cartoon where there's a big picture of Obama and a headline disparaging the bill AND add in the fact that Obama is generally viewed as the father of the bill — well, it's a perfect storm, isn't it?
We're left with these options:

1) The Post and its cartoonist are naive and clueless to the extreme
2) They're deliberately trolling for a response, well aware of the violent and racist stink to this cartoon — and they got it