This afternoon I went looking to buy the New York Post. I don’t normally read the Post. It’s honestly not that great a newspaper, though they have the best headline writers in the business. I normally read The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.
So why was I out looking to buy the Post? Because there’s an effort afoot to boycott the post and have its editor and a cartoonist fired.
The NY Post ran an editorial cartoon by Sean Delonas that referenced the shooting death of a chimpanzee in Connecticut after it attacked and gruesomely mauled a woman and what it saw as the sloppy cobbling together of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the Stimulus bill.
The message of the cartoon is simple: the stimulus bill was such a crazy and sloppy piece of work it could have been written by a crazed primate. But for the NAACP, its supporters and fellow racial activists, the cartoon is racist.
Because racists have called blacks apes and monkeys, a cartoon that depicts an ape or monkey and in any way appears to criticize the Obama administration is depicting Obama as monkey and is racist. If that absurd jump in logic is not bad enough, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous takes the racial hysteria one step further and said the cartoon was “an invitation to assassinate” President Obama.
If anyone should be offended by the cartoon, it is the victim of the recent chimpanzee mauling in Connecticut who suffered horrific injuries and her family. What makes the cartoon controversy so troubling is that such a narrow view promoted by race-baiting activists and politicians is taken so seriously by media outlets. The mainstream media should not only know better, but has a vested interest in standing up against such hysteria.
After the Post published a half-hearted non-apology, the NAACP demanded more careers be sacrificed at the altar of political correctness and called for a boycott of the newspaper until the cartoonist, editor and anyone else responsible for the cartoon’s publication be fired and a sincere apology made. The NAACP call for a boycott of the Post, which is why I was out looking to buy a copy of a paper I don’t really like and wouldn’t normally read.
“Anti-racism” has been the new McCarthyism in American politics for many years. The fear of being labeled a racist has the effect today that being labeled a communist used to have. Self-appointed guardians against racism apply that toxic label very loosely, to include anyone who questions policies of racial preferences, immigration or, since January 20, the policies of President Barack Obama.
The NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is celebrating its centennial. It was founded, in part, to stop lynching. Now that a person of color (“colored person” would be horribly racist, unless you’re the NAACP) has advanced to the White House, the NAACP finds itself in a search for relevancy. Smearing cartoonists and engaging in a racist witch hunt is not going to do it.
Instead, let us invite those denouncing the NY Post to heed President Obama’s call in his inaugural address, when he referenced scripture in asking us to now set aside childish things.
When I went looking for the Post, I didn’t find any. Both newsstands near my home were sold out. Maybe it was because it was late in the day. I prefer to think that it’s because people of all races are no longer drinking the PC Kool-Aid.
1 comment:
Hear, hear, Matt. The very idea that a mainstream publication in the US would deliberately compare a black president to a crazed monkey in 2009 is so ridiculous that it shouldn't cross anyone's mind. Why does it? Because they've found there is power in it. Until folks stop reacting to the race-mongering, that power will continue to be abused.
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