Racist and Stupid is No Way To Govern... Or Maybe It Is

It appears that the manufactured controversy surrounding the Sean Delonas editorial cartoon that used the tabloidesque incident of a chimpanzee mauling a woman in Connecticut as a jumping off point for criticizing the nearly $800 billion Multi-Generational Financial Rape Act—AKA the "stimulus"—has now entered its second day, with New York’s blind governor David Patterson chiming in with an opinion about an image he had described to him, but which he cannot see.

Paterson, who had the cartoon described to him during a news conference in Manhattan, said it is incumbent upon Post editors to explain "what the cartoon was intended to portray."

Images of black people portrayed as primates, Paterson said, "do feed a kind of negative and stereotypical way that some people think."

And indeed, if the point of the editorial cartoon was to portray African-Americans as primates, it should be viewed as racist.

But the simple fact of the matter is, as even leftist bomb-thrower Jonathan Chait noted, is that sometimes a monkey is just a monkey.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock during the past week, one of the biggest news stories in the United States today is the horrid real-life tale of Travis the Chimp, a powerful 200-lb. adult male chimpanzee that went berserk in Connecticut, severely mauling his owner's friend before being shot and killed as he attacked police officers responding to desperate cries for help.

The animal shredded the victim's arms—some early accounts claimed he bit off her hands—before biting and ripping off large portions of her face. The owner stabbed the chimpanzee with a butcher knife in an attempt to save her friend, at which point the wounded animal finally broke off his attack.

After the police arrived, the rampaging, blood-soaked primate pinned one officer in his vehicle, and after ripping off the side-view mirror of the police cruiser with his hands, the chimp opened the door to attack the officer. The officer fired on the chimp in self-defense at point-blank range, killing the enraged animal and ending one of the most bizarre and tragic news stories in recent memory.

The vividly imagined aftermath of the attack is the physical event cartoonist Delonas portrayed in his cartoon. In and of itself, the art of the cartoon portrays nothing but a current event, as it shown with this modified version of the image, which shows the cartoon, sans text.

Clearly, there is no way a rational person can intelligently ascribe a racial component to the artist's depiction of an actual current event. The police officers represent police officers, the dead chimpanzee represents an actual, dead, and publicly known chimpanzee.

Nor was the text of the cartoon itself in any way racist.

It read, simply:

"They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

The text, of course, refers to the largest single spending bill ever rammed down the throats of American taxpayers under the guise of "stimulating" a U.S. economy languishing in a recession.

The legislation was the handiwork of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, a rich white woman and stereotypical San Francisco limousine liberal who encouraged a team of Democratic Representatives and lobbyists to cobble together a wish list of liberal spending and handouts to loyal contributors and special interest groups—pure, unadulterated "pork." The legislation was thrown together so quickly that few if any, of the Democrats that pushed it through the House of Representatives under Pelosi's leadership read the bill the voted for, nor did any of the Democrats that rejected the bill, which was so poorly written, and so filled with overt graft, patronage, and corruption that it could not attract a single Republican vote.

In the Senate, the House legislation was lightly modified to provide pork-barrel spending that bought the votes of the two Republican Senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania. The legislation passed in the Senate with only the purchased votes of this Republican Senators and without any dissent from Democrats.

The differences between the massive House and Senate bills were hammered between Democrats selected by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader. Not one single Republican from the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate was allowed to participate in the lobbyist-inspired alchemy that resulted in the final conference bill, which was then rammed through so quickly—and in direct violation of pledges from Democratic leaders—that not one single legislator had a chance to read the Frankenstein's monster of a $787-billion, 1,073-page bill before voting on it in its final form. Unread, and still not entirely understood, it was sent to the President to be signed into law, which he did so Tuesday, also without reading it.

When the art and the text are in its proper context, there is no way any rational person can misconstrue the intent of the cartoon for anything other than what it was; a scathing critique of a stimulus bill so horribly crafted by Congress that it appears it was written by a crazed chimpanzee, a chimpanzee that is now deceased.

Of course, I'm talking about rational people with a reasonable grasp of current events and without a political axe to grind, and not those who are part of a finely-tuned grievance industry in need of a bailout, where everything and anything is "racist," no matter how absurd.