The page in the New York Post before this cartoon featured a photograph of President Obama signing [writing] the Stimulus Bill. Putting aside the offensive connotation, does the cartoon work on any level? Is there a joke in linking the Chimpanzee gone native in Connecticut to the Stimulus Bill? What is it?
Is the cartoonist drawing on a third association, to the big laugh line from Die Hard, when an helicopter full of FBI guys, snotty agents who didn’t want the assistance of our hero, explodes, and an LAPD regular says: “I guess they’ll have to get some more FBI guys.”
What is it? The Stimulus Bill was written by a monkey? It was argued and reshaped by a dueling phalanx of legislators. It may have become disfigured, but was it by any stretch engineered by a monkey?
Certainly the moneyed class, which Murdoch represents, objects to giving any of the treasury to middle America. It can go to banks, or CEOs, or in the form of tax cuts to the multi-billionaires, but craft an economic solution that puts jobs or financial relief in the hands of ordinary people and the corporate press is not interested. So the bill author would be a bleeding-heart, or a sentimentalist, or Rainman for that matter. But where does the analogy work as a monkey?
A chimp-faced lampoon worked for Bush, because of the resemblance, and the mental acuity, and verbal skills. The Stimulus Bill can be plenty of wrong things, was it dumb?
II.
Here’s the apology the NYPost offered for their cartoon. What they said, or left unsaid, certainly didn’t match their bad taste to argue their cartoon wasn’t about Obama, but naming the piece THAT CARTOON.
Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.
It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
III.
This note came in from Rita Ague:
What’s wrong with this picture?
Of course there’s racism out there, but be careful not to fall victom to spin. Rupert M. is one of the giants in the neo-con coup d’etat. The loss of a free press to military/industrial/corporate interests, and resulting news being turned into spin and hate mongering, is but one of many reasons I’ve put back on my old legal and journalist hats.
We are in such a hell of a mess, and we’re passing that mess onto and into the rest of the world. I’m not sure we can dig ourselves out. We may not see relief, and the kind of change we of good hearts and good minds so long for, come about in our lifetime.
Let’s pray constantly that some Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch induced bigot, or a neo-con agent posing as same, does not shoot or do away with Obama. The cause of the killing will, of course, be blamed on racism. But the real reason will be the fear the neo-cons have that our new president is going to take away their power and control, and quash their currently-being-exposed incredible greed.
My fear is that Murdoch, by and through his New York Post newspaper, FOX spin and hate channel, and all the other mass media he and his Neocon cohorts own and/or control, is spinning us to believe that some forthcoming assassination, when it occurs, was inevitable and based on a rise on racism and hatred, when it was truly based on more evil, Karl Rove-like Machiavellian (the end justifies any means) manipulation.
God help and protect us all, particularly Barack Obama.
Rita followed it up with this plea to MoveOn.org:
I need your help, Marc, in getting out the warning through Move-On’s far reaching Internet connections:
BEWARE! THE GIANT (military/industrial/corporate) NEO-CON SPIN MACHINE (formerly known as the “liberal mass media”) IS CRANKING UP
OBAMA, BAR THE DOOR!!!
I’m scared, Marc. It wasn’t accidental that the Post ran the dead ape cartoon with it’s deadly caption. Nor is it an accident that we are suddenly hearing more and more about all the racism and all the ‘racist’ assassination attempts being planned and made on Obama.
My intuition/precognition will be supported if and when we hear more of this racism and hate against “The Man” jive. As the old advertising saying goes: ‘When you think they’re tired of hearing about it, that’s when they’re just beginning to catch onto what you’re trying to tell/sell.”
I could be wrong about this “IT WAS A RACIST THING THAT DID HIM IN” campaign, but just in case I’m right, shouldn’t we be safe rather than sorry, and get a Move-On Campaign and heavy duty word of mouth going through the net, that we’re onto what’s being spun in the mass media, and why it’s being spun.
For sometime now, my slogan has been UNDO THE (military/industrial/corporate) COUP! Now I think we’d better come up with a new slogan, and start spreading it, as far and as wide as we can. It could be something like:
KEEP OBAMA ALIVE AND WELL – TELL THE PRESS TO GO TO HELL!
Obama is covering up for George Bush’s Administration use of torture as policy. He wants to have it both ways, first claiming that he is changing policy, then in engaging in the old policies of ‘rendition’ and coverup of torture of POWs held by the US military. But there is yet another coverup underway, and that is how Obama is covering up for George Bush’s illegal support for the illegal actions of Israel in Gaza and elsewhere (remember Lebanon?). He may want to repeat the same under his own Administration? From MSNBC:
This is by no means a complete list of contemporary populist heros, but I’d like to start with comedian 
I’m reading about the Sumarians (5,300 – 2,000 B.C.) FROM THE TABLETS OF SUMER: 39 Firsts in Man’s Recorded History. The Sumarians originated civilization as we know it, and their demise may look a lot like ours too. In case you missed the memo, Sumer was earliest Mesopotamia in southern Iraq.
Guantanamo is just the tip of the iceberg for taking down the work of the Bush-Cheney Klan that now continues to infiltrate positions of power at all levels throughout the US. Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio has already murdered some of his prisoners, tortured many more of them, and is himself nothing more than a common criminal. He belongs in jail but just not his own one. He needs to be taken out of power first of all, but then thrown in a Federal Prison where he most certainly does belong! 
I am neither handy with a monkey-wrench, nor am I much of an outdoorsman, but when environmentalist Tim DeChristopher took the eco fight to a federal land lease auction, it was an example of disruptive activism for which I know I am qualified. There is an undisturbed comfort in thinking one person cannot make a difference, even if just in lacking for ideas how. Dare I say for most of us, now DeChristopher and Ebay have closed that loophole.
“He [Obama] created a 25 member advisory council and named 15 of its members yesterday, including several high-profile evangelicals — the Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a Florida megachurch, and the Rev. Frank Page, president emeritus of the Southern Baptist Convention — as well as representatives from secular nonprofits, which largely had little association with Bush’s faith-based initiative. The council members are to advise the faith office on policy but will not play a direct role in allocating federal grants. The office will be headed by Joshua DuBois, a 26-year-old Pentecostal who worked on religious issues for Obama’s campaign.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is fighting pancreatic cancer. What kind of comfort is it that Ginsburg survived the Bush regime in time for President Barack Obama to ride to the rescue and appoint a conservative replacement?! If there’s a centrist path toward repealing Roe v. Wade, surely Obama can find it.
The Pentagon has been suppressing the press. ‘Mr Davis said a High Court ruling, which pointed to complicity by the UK and US authorities in his torture, was prevented from being published after the US put pressure on the UK.’ 
The Denver Post ran an article this Sunday that paints a pretty sad picture of what’s going on in Health Care as the Obama Regime stands by. 
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tom Daschle collected nearly a quarter of a million dollars in fees in the last two years speaking to leaders of the industry President Barack Obama wants him to reform as the administration’s health secretary.