If you saw anything inherently racist about this cartoon, there's no escaping it: you're an asshole.
The controversy stems from the idea that the chimpanzee in the cartoon being shot by the police represents President Obama. This wasn't a problem when it was George W. Bush being represented as a monkey, but it is now because Obama is black. Historically, race baiters on the white side of the picket fence would compare blacks with monkeys, because monkeys are predominantly dark in their skin and fur and aren't terribly smart.
And that would be, dare I say, inappropriate, if it were meant to be Obama. The passing reference to the "Stimulus Bill" (federal buggering part deux) was meant as a jab at the authors of the bill being as wise as the chimp in the picture. The chimp being shot by the police is a reference to another recent story where an escaped chimp mauled a few people in Connecticut and had to be subdued by police with extreme prejudice.
I'm going to link to pretty pictures for this next section, as the people who need this section don't seem to get how America works, because even a chimp with a slight grasp of civics in this country would know that CONGRESS (the assholes who work in this building) is in charge of writing and passing laws. The President (the asshole who works in this building) signs the laws and executes them. Yes, it's true, and it drives the nanny-staters to tears to hear it: the legislative branch legislates while the executive branch executes. When the Constitution (this thing) gets in the way of people who want sudden and drastic change from a powerful executive, you tend to get a lot of people taking to the streets.
Sorry for that tangent, but back to the point: The chimp in the cartoon was supposed to represent Congress, not Obama. Generally when a character in a political cartoon is supposed to represent a specific person, the cartoonist generally makes the character look even passingly like the public figure in question. Even when Bush was a monkey you still knew it was Bush (granted he looked very monkey-like to begin with). But even if you had a particularly adventurous cartoonist who let loose with the metaphors, there would have been an "OBAMA" written somewhere on or near the monkey. He probably would also have been wearing people clothes. Instead, the chimp represented Congress or even just the authors of the bill in general, who probably had their heads up their asses when they allocated funds. This is backed up with the
very blatant reference to the authors of the bill, who we have already figured out by pure constitutional law and logic could not be the President!
...as an afterthought, let's also just consider the premise of the cartoon. It's the police shooting the chimp, not some crazy bastard with a grudge against blacks. And since when do cops shoot the commander in chief? Chimps, yes. Criminals, yes. A few of the swindlers in Congress, I would certainly hope so. But I would certainly not expect that the NY Post is advocating a coup d’état, and if they were I'd be more worried about that than any sort of implicit racism.
But of course no one wants to listen to reason in this country, and out come the hipster squares with their picketing and chanting and god damned fucking puppets. Maybe no puppets this time, but still. Why all the hullabaloo? Easy: they see their messiah threatened in the public arena and they want to protect him from all of the mean people out there who just want to make him fail. Because they're racists. And mean.
Why the NY Post even apologized is beyond me - though at least they didn't go as far as to retract or denounce the cartoon. All they should have said to those who said that the cartoon was a racist attack on Obama was: "No it's not; get a life."
