Looks like we will be playing this game for at least the next 4 years. The NY Post published this pictures recently and people are up in arms, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, who called the cartoon "troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys."
I have to admit, I am sometimes blind to racism, inasmuch as i don't look for it around every corner and behind every action. Until Rev. Al mentioned it, I just saw this cartoon as a play on the old saying about if you get enough monkeys in a room with tipewriters, one of them will write Shakespeare. I saw the cartoon as a comment on the monkeys in Congress, not as a reference to Obama.
I have said it before and I will say it again,we are going to have to start letting shit go, black people. We cannot continue to see the world only through the prism of our own real and imagined pain. I don't want to live in a world where everyone is on such eggshells about offending someone that public discourse dies.
Rev. Al, foul ball (ooo, look at me with the sports reference. How butch!)
That said, I am more offended by the use of the monkey as a joke. It is not AT ALL funny what happened to that woman when that chimp jumped on her. That animal belonged in a zoo and his owner should be facing some serious charges. She keeps referring to the chimp as her son and herself as its Mom. I always find people who anthropo-morphize their pets to be a little wierd and this takes the cake.
NY Post, that's a strike for extremely poor taste.