Post backtracks after taking heat over cartoon featuring a couple of police officers shooting a chimpanzee
Two days ago, the New York Post ran an ill-considered cartoon featuring a couple of police officers shooting a chimpanzee. “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” says one cop to the other. The idea, says the Post, was to mock the fiscal package currently before Congress as ineptly written (a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters etc, etc.). The cartoon also vaguely referenced the police shooting of a chimp that had attacked a woman in Connecticut. Alas, it quickly incurred the wrath of African Americans who thought the chimp was a thinly veiled and racist reference to President Barack Obama. Today, the Post apologizes to those who were truly offended, but goes on to blame the controversy on “opportunists” who had axes to grind with the paper. “Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon,” it says. True enough. Then again, sometimes an apology is not really an apology.