I’ll take the side that it was lame and stupidly crossed the line on 3 matters enough that it should be unacceptable to most Americans.
1. It may have been intended for Congress, but the cartoonist made it about Obama by what he drew by only having a single chimp vs. a group of them that could plausibly been labelled “deranged Congresscritters”.
2. It violated the standing taboo, based on deep American trauma, of depicting our elected national leader assassinated.
3. Cartoon convention says you never, ever depict blacks you wish to ridicule as apes. There are certain “racist” or “ethnically offensive” stereotypes one avoids in cartoons. For example, the NY Post has somehow yet to depict Chuck Schumer as a hook-nosed Jew in a beanie-cap slavering all over himself as Wall Street types shove fistfuls of money at him. Apparantly the Post fears the immense power of NYC Jews, and gives NYC blacks little thought on what sort of cartoons pass muster.
It is something that Right Wing Republicans will be tempted to do as “payback” for the years when Lefties depicted the wide-mouthed, slightly jut-eared Bush as “McChimpy”. And Obama has world class jut-ears, close-cropped hair, pronounced jaw and small nose that can easily be made into an apelike caricature. And NOT savaging Obama as a black ape would mean “A double standard exists!!”
But it would be stupid.
Going after Obama with racial overtones would further fix in peoples minds outside the White, Southern Fundie Base that Republicans are a Party of Bigots, unwelcoming of minorities and anyone that fails to pass a series of Right Wing litmus tests.
