No, THEY’RE not racist! I am!

One of the Repugnicans’/wingnuts’ interesting tactics is to call a liberal/progressive “racist” for simply bringing up the issue of race at all.*

Because the wingnuts/Repugnicans, you see, are totally color-blind! (As thoroughly evidenced by the brown-skinned Repugnican National Committee head Michael Steele and Louisiana Gov. Bobby “Not Ready for Prime Time” Jindal!)

Yet interestingly, we see things like the distribution of a CD including the song “Barack the Magic Negro” from a candidate for the Repugnican National Committee, and the Repugnican mayor of a small city in the red county of Orange County in Southern California is resigning after having sent out an e-mail containing this image:

The tag line for the image? “No Easter egg hunt this year.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

(The Associated Press reports that the mayor, Dean Grose, “claimed he was unaware of the racial stereotype linking black people with eating watermelons.” Yeah, right. If he truly had been unaware of that, then why would the image have been worth sharing via e-mail? If he truly had been unaware of the meaning of the watermelons, wouldn’t the image have been nonsensical to him? Why the fuck would he have shared an image that was nonsensical to him? [Q: How can you tell when a Repugnican is lying? A: When his or her lips are moving!])

The watermelons-on-the-White-House-lawn image is as funny as were the Aunt Jemima-like “Obama Waffles” that were sold at the wingnuts’ Values Voters Summit in September:

Associated Press photo

Because blatant fucking racism is one of the “values voters'” values.

But I’m the racist for even discussing this, you see.

Clearly, the Civil War never really ended.

Clearly, there is a sizeable chunk of so-called Americans who have a real problem with the race of the man whom the majority of us Americans elected to the White House.

Clearly, we, the majority of the American people, who voted for Barack Obama, need to put these racists in their place — bloodlessly, hopefully, but that will be up to the racist wingnut traitors, who already are talking about the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of the United States of America.

*One of the wingnut traitors tried this tactic on me recently in a comment of his on my recent post about the idea of the secession of the red states, which, I believe, garnered more hits than anything else I’ve posted.

‘Socialism’? ‘Class warfare’? I HOPE so!

So the stupid white men who can’t get over the facts that Repugnican stupid white man John McCainosaurus lost the presidential election on Nov. 4, 2008,  and that a black man is president of the United States continue to cry (in the political wilderness) “socialism” and “class warfare.”

Democrat Barack Obama, who was democratically elected by the majority of American voters in November (I need to remind the Repugnicans and other assorted wingnuts of that fucking fact), today was called “the world’s best salesman of socialism” by Repugnican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

DeMint warned that conservatives might have to “take to the streets to stop America’s slide into socialism.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Bring it on, red-state bitches!

We’re long overdue for another civil war.

DeMint seems to be talking about the violent overthrow of the democratically elected White House administration — the very same thing that the wingnuts tried to do in Venezuela to democratically elected President Hugo Chavez in 2002. (The right-wing coup, in which a right-wing friend of the oil magnates was installed as the new Venezuelan “president” in place of the democratically elected Chavez [not entirely unlike how right-wing friend of the oil magnates George W. Bush was forcibly installed as “president”], failed when the people of Venezuela, sick and tired of being shit and pissed upon by their right-wing oppressors, fought back against the illegal right-wing coup [which had the full blessing of the unelected Bush regime, by the way] and Chavez was returned to power. The right-wing coup lasted no more than three days.) 

I am a white man but I am a gay white man and I am not a stupid white man, and I, for one, am willing to die in order to ensure the death of continued rule by stupid white men, which will result in freedom for every American. (“Freedom” is a buzz word the stupid white men love to throw around, but the fucking fact of the matter is that they want freedom only for themselves.)

Far too many of us Americans — those of us who are women, those of us who are non-white, those of us who are not “Christian,” those of us who are not heterosexual, those of us who are the victims of unbridled capitalism, et. al., et. al. — have been under the oppression of stupid white men, who are a fucking minority, for far too long.

It’s long past time to finally bring to the nation the life, liberty and happiness that was promised to all Americans long, long ago.

The wingnut traitors can call that “socialism” or “communism” or  “fascism” or whatever the fuck they want to call it; the fucking fact of the matter is that freedom — real freedom, not the faux “freedom” that the wingnuts espouse — for all Americans is going to continue to march on, whether the stupid white men like it or not.

Those stupid white men who continue to stand in our way — we need to knock them down as the traitors that they are.

It’s safe to tell Obama’s detractors to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down

I noted in my previous post that President Barack Obama and his policies and his performance thus far have the support of about two-thirds of Americans, and that his detractors comprise only about a third of Americans.

Numerous recent national polls bear this out. Depending upon the question asked, Obama garners the support of anywhere from 60-something percent to even 80-something percent of national poll respondents, and his opposition is only 20-something to 30-percent of the respondents (and sometimes, depending upon the question, they’re as low as in the teens).

So: Why the fuck do we even bother to pay any attention at all to Obama’s detractors?

Obama’s detractors, who need to be taught that when your party loses an election your party is out of power, safely can be told to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.

Not to say that we don’t need to be wary of gun-toting paranoid stupid white men who think that the members of the minority groups that historically have been oppressed by the stupid white men (non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christians,” et. al.) are going to come get them (thus, the “need” for the stupid white men’s personal arsenals).

But the fact of the matter is that the nation is on the brink of disaster, and we can’t afford to give our time and energy to the idiots who insanely still are espousing the same broken ideology that brought us to this brink of national disaster in the first place.

I mean, think about it: these assbites’ ideology has brought the American empire the closest to its destruction at least during my lifetime of four decades, yet rather than shut up and sit down while the rest of us try to fix the mess that they created, these assbites are asserting that what will fix the American empire is more of the same: to continue to let stupid white men ransack the nation with corporate thievery and bogus wars (for war profiteering) while the nation rots from within from such things as lack of health care, unemployment, substandard education and crumbling infrastructure. 

These same people, who are hell-bent on destroying the nation — a good number of them are “Christo”fascists who believe in the “end times,” which they want to make a self-fulfilling prophecy — accuse others of “treason.”

No, I think that those of us who wish to save the nation from the destruction wrought by the roughly one-third of Americans who oppose President Obama are the true patriots, and it’s time to treat those so-called Americans who want us to continue on the path to destruction as the traitors that they are. 

Minimally, we can ignore the irrelevant, obsolete motherfuckers and just let them continue to pitch their fits (including their pathetic cries of “socialism!”) while the rest of us patriots do the work that needs to be done to restore our nation from Repugnican ruin.

Brown is the new white!

Associated Press photo

Look! This brown guy is a Repugnican!: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (shown above) was chosen by the Repugnicans to deliver their response to President Barack Obama’s quasi-State of the Union address because the Repugnicans won’t be outdone by the Democrats where it comes to hipness. While the woman-hating Democrats didn’t choose Billary Clinton as the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, for instance, the uber-hip Repugnicans chose rabid feminist Sarah Palin-Quayle as John McCainosaurus’ running mate. Because the Repugnicans are progressive!

Every time the Repugnicans want to counter President Barack Obama, it seems, they counter him with a relatively younger, brown-skinned Repugnican (of whom there are precious few).

Late last month the Repugnicans chose former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, as the new chair of the Repugnican National Committee, and they chose Repugnican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is of Indian descent, to give the response to President Obama’s quasi-State of the Union address tonight.

The Repugnicans can’t attack Obama on the grounds of his substance or his popularity — about two-thirds of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance thus far and approve of the economic stimulus package — so they try to match Obama’s physical appearance and demographics by trotting out some younger, brown-skinned guy who sold his soul to the Repugnican Party.

“Look! We’re as hip as the Democrats!” the Repugnicans — whose party is going the way of the dinosaurs that they don’t believe in — are saying.

Since the Repugnicans refuse to go on substance, I guess that I will, too. I won’t go into the details of Obama’s quasi-State of the Union address or Jindal’s pathetic response, except to say that it’s pretty fucking funny to hear a Repugnican call the economic stimulus package “irresponsible.”

Because clearly, the past eight fucking years have demonstrated amply that the Repugnicans, who have the support of only about a third of the nation right now, are all about responsibility.

P.S. OK, if you want substance, I’ll explain it yet once again: the Repugnicans’ problem with the economic stimulus package is not that it is the “irresponsible” spending of tax dollars; after all, Repugnican “President” George W. Bush ran up the largest federal budget deficit in the nation’s history, in no small part because of the bogus Vietraq War that he launched in March 2003 for the war profits of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp.

No, that’s not irresponsible, to steal hundreds of billions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury and hand it to stupid rich white men via the bogus war in Vietraq — while the nation crumbles.

Spending the taxpayers’ dollars on things that the taxpayers actually need, such as job development, education, health care and infrastructure — now, that is the height of irresponsibility!

Vast left-wing conspiracy!

Associated Press photo

Why is Repugnican Sarah Palin-Quayle still speaking?

(That’s mostly rhetorical, but I’ll answer it anyway: Because she actually believes that she’ll be president one day.)

Reports Politico today:

Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) believes that the media deliberately tried to bring her down during her vice presidential run.

As part of an interview with conservative filmmaker John Ziegler for his new film out this week, Palin said she believes the media made a decision that “we’re going to seek and we’re going to destroy this candidacy of Sarah Palin’s because of what it is that she represents.”

“Obviously something big took place in the media,” she added. It is “very frightening, I think, what the media was able to get away with, this go around.”

Palin suggested that unbalanced media coverage posed a threat to democracy.

“This is for the sake of our democracy that there is fairness in this other branch of government, if you will, called the media,” she said. “It is foreign to me the way some in the mainstream media are thinking.”

“There have been lies told, there have been reputations trashed, there have been children that have been harmed,” she continued.

Looking back on her interview with ABC News’ Charles Gibson, in which Palin seemed unsure of how to define the Bush doctrine, the Alaska governor said she was disrespected in a way that another candidate would not have been.

“I’d have to say there would be much more respect shown to the subject, yes,” she said.

The media had the audacity to — gasp! — ask Sarah “One Heartbeat Away” Palin-Quayle questions! Questions that she could not answer!

How unfair! What a conspiracy!

The problem, you see, is not that Palin-Quayle cannot answer even rather simple civics questions, such as what the “Bush doctrine” is (the “Bush doctrine,” by the way, can be summed up as “might makes right”), yet believes that she is qualified to be president; the problem, clearly, is a vast left-wing conspiracy!

Yes, the very same corporately controlled mainstream media that acted as blind cheerleaders rather than as critical, analytical, investigative journalists for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War are out to get Sarah Palin-Quayle!  

And when Palin-Quayle asserts that the media were out to “destroy” her candidacy “because of what it is that she represents,” what else could she be talking about except God and Jesus and love and light and puppies and kittens?

Yup; an attack on Sarah Palin-Quayle = an attack on God and Jesus (and puppies and kittens, too)!

Hey, I have a running mate for Palin-Quayle for 2012: Jesus! Yes: Palin-Quayle-Jesus Christ 2012! Get your T-shirts and bumper stickers now!

Shit, Palin-Quayle even ridiculously asserts that “children … have been harmed.” So she’s even using children as human shields, politically speaking. Nice! 

In further seriousness, Palin-Quayle’s comments about the media are indicative of the “Christo”fascism that she would try to impose on the nation should she actually manage to attain higher office.

Statements of hers such as that it is “very frightening, I think, what the media was able to get away with, this go around,” certainly indicate that Palin-Quayle is no friend of the First Amendment — she did, after all, as mayor of Podunk, Alaska, fire the village’s librarian because the librarian refused to ban books, as Palin-Quayle wanted her to do.

We of the supposed vast left-wing conspiracy need to nip Palin-Quayle’s 2012 candidacy in the bud.

Yes, we should destroy her 2012 candidacy for what it represents: “Christo”fascism.

If she would silence the members of the media whom she believes aren’t giving her only the flattering coverage that the former beauty-queen-pageant contestant deserves, where would she stop in silencing her detractors?

And in dealing not only with Palin-Quayle but also with the rest of the remants of the “permanent Repugnican majority” (ha ha ha!), we progressives need to employ all of the tactics that the wingnuts have used on us progressives for the past several years, including refusing to allow them a significant voice in the U.S. Congress, as the Repugnicans stunningly absolutely refused the Democrats a voice in the U.S. Congress when the Democrats were in the minority.

The motherfuckers need a taste of their own God-damned medicine.*

*For instance, wingnut Bill O’Reilly loves to cut the microphone of progressive dissenters who actually have very good points to make; he cuts their mikes, in fact, because they have such good points to make.

So I have no problem whatsover cutting the microphone, so to speak, of the wingnuts who think that they can use the comments function of my blog to spew forth their right-wing garbage that is full of misinformation, half-truths and flat-out, bold-faced lies and reasoning that is twisted like a pretzel that George W. Bush would choke on.

Get used to it, wingnut bitches. Payback is hell.

Quote of the week

“All of us [of the Democratic Governors Association] are committed to working with President Obama to pull our nation’s economy out of the ditch that George W. Bush ran it into. If some of the fringe governors don’t want to do that, they need to step aside and not stand in the way of the nation’s interests.”

— Democratic Maine Gov. Martin O’Malley

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ deserved it

A still from the film “Slumdog Millionaire,” which tonight deservedly won Best Picture and Best Director for Danny Boyle.

I’m a gay man and so I guess that I was supposed to be rooting for “Milk” for Best Picture and/or Best Director (Gus Van Sant), but the fact of the matter is that I enjoyed “Slumdog Millionaire” more than I did “Milk,” so I don’t think that “Milk” was slighted tonight by the awarding of Best Picture and Best Director to “Slumdog Millionaire” and its director, Danny Boyle.

Of course, comparing “Slumdog Millionaire” to “Milk” is comparing apples to oranges, but, it seems to me, it took a lot more creative talent and energy to invent and capture on film the enthralling and clever fictional story of “Slumdog” than it did to depict the life of the real-life Harvey Milk, which biographers and historians (and at least one documentary filmmaker) already had documented and which only needed to be re-enacted. (Indeed, at least two or three scenes in “Milk” are re-enacted television news clips.)

Sean Penn’s performance as Harvey Milk certainly deserved the Best Actor award, which (along with its award for Best Original Screenplay [“Slumdog” won for Best Adapted Screenplay]) is ample reward for “Milk.” (And don’t get me wrong; anyone who cares about equal civil and human rights for all Americans needs to see “Milk.”)

Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor award for his peformance as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” also was deserved. Some will assert that Ledger was given the award only because he died, but Ledger’s intense performance is the only thing that makes “The Dark Knight” worth watching; he did a hell of a job in that film.

Penelope Cruz, who won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” made that film, too, and so I’m happy with her win.

I haven’t seen “The Reader,” for which Kate Winslet won Best Actress, but I guess that I will see it now. I’ve always liked Kate Winslet, whom I did see in “Revolutionary Road.”

I didn’t watch the Oscars this year — I rarely watch TV — but this year’s awards seem mostly deserved.

What’s next? Secession? (I hope!)

Updated Saturday, February 21, 2009 (see below)

Red-state and especially Southern Repugnican (that’s pretty redundant…) governors are at least considering to refuse some of the funds that would be offered to their states as a result of the economic stimulus package that was democratically passed by the U.S. Congress.

Reports Politico today:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced [today] that he will decline stimulus money specifically targeted at expanding state unemployment insurance coverage, becoming the first state executive to officially refuse any part of the federal government’s payout to states.

In a statement, Jindal, who is slated to give the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s message to Congress on Tuesday, expressed concern that expanding unemployment insurance coverage would lead to increased unemployment insurance taxes later on.

“The federal money in this bill will run out in less than three years for this benefit and our businesses would then be stuck paying the bill,” Jindal said. “We must be careful and thoughtful as we examine all the strings attached to the funding in this package. We cannot grow government in an unsustainable way.”

Jindal is one of a small group of Republican governors, which includes South Carolina’s Mark Sanford and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, who have said they might refuse some or all of the stimulus money targeted to their states.

In an interview [today], Barbour said he, too, would likely decline funds for broadening access to unemployment insurance.

“Subject to learning more, my position is that Mississippi won’t accept funds that require us to have a tax increase later, because [they would force] us to change our rules for qualifying for unemployment compensation,” he said.

It is not clear which, if any, other parts of the stimulus funding Republican governors will decline. But initial suggestions that anti-stimulus governors might decline all the funds targeted for their states have faded.

Joel Sawyer, Sanford’s communications director, said the South Carolina governor was still reviewing his options with respect to the stimulus.

“We haven’t made any decisions on any part of the stimulus yet,” Sawyer said.

Gee, maybe the blue states should have refused the Bush regime’s orders to send their National Guard personnel to the Vietraq War, because that certainly wasn’t in the blue states’ best interests.

There are a whole host of things on which the blue states, for good reasons, could have and should have bucked the Bush regime — but did not.

So who in the fuck are these red states to refuse to be a part of the United States?

And why didn’t these Repugnican governors have any problem with billions and billions of American taxpayers’ dollars going to the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, via the unelected Bush regime’s Vietraq War? They don’t want to help the unemployed, but they’ll wholeheartedly support bogus wars that result in the plundering of the U.S. Treasury by the war profiteers and result in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of U.S. military personnel (not to mention the unnecessary deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians).

The Repugnicans actually have no problem whatsofuckingever with high federal government spending, as evidenced by the fact that under the unelected Bush regime the federal budget deficit grew to an all-time high.

The Repugnicans just don’t want the federal government to spend any money in any way that actually benefits the common American — instead of giving the American taxpayers’ money away to war profiteers and other crooked Repugnican cronies.

How about the red states that have a problem with the fact that the majority of Americans democratically elected a black man as president just go ahead and secede from the union — now?

We don’t need them anyway — more federal tax dollars go to the dumbfuck red states than the red states return to the U.S. Treasury. The red states are welfare states anyway, so it’s rather ironic that their governors would refuse any portion of the funds from the economic stimulus package.

While I long have thought that a second civil war to polish off the red states, which only drag down the entire nation, sure would be nice, we can avoid the bloodshed and just let the ignoramuses secede. 

Hell, we can even build walls dividing the treasonous red states from the blue states.

Why do we blue-staters continue to kiss red-state ass?

Why do we continue to tolerate the red-staters and the Repugnicans telling us that our not blindly supporting their unelected mass-murdering dictator, George W. Bush, amounted to treason on our part, yet here are the very same red-staters and Repugnicans refusing to cooperate with our president who actually was democratically elected?

Red states, please, please, please secede and see how long you make it on your own. And, my fellow blue-staters, let’s let them secede this time.

Updated (Saturday, February 21, 2009):

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Repugnican who has to be a moderate in order to survive politically in the very blue state of California, jokes(?) that he’ll be happy to accept for California any of the economic stimulus funds that other states’ Repugnican governors refuse. Reports Politico today:

Fresh off a grueling budget battle in his state, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said [today] that if fellow Republican governors threatening to turn down stimulus funds follow through on their pledge, he’d be happy to have their share.

“Everyone has their own way of thinking,” Schwarzenegger said of those governors in an interview with Politico at the National Governors Association‘s annual meeting. “I just hope they give me their funding.”

Schwarzenegger supports President Barack Obama‘s $778 billion stimulus, but four Republican governors have said they may reject some of the stimulus funds….

I don’t expect the red-state governors actually to refuse much, if any, of the stimulus funds. I think that for political gain they just want to look like they’re rejecting the “socialism” of the economic stimulus package, when, in fact, as I noted, their states are welfare states supported by the blue states anyway, so I anticipate that they’ll take the free money from the blue states, as they always have.

And still yet another example of stunning Repugnican hypocrisy

In the late 1990s, the Repugnicans told the nation that it was vitally important to get down to the truth about Bill Clinton’s blow job(s).

Today, the Repugnicans vehemently resist any and all efforts to get down to the truth about the felonious behavior of the members of the Bush regime.

Reports The Associated Press today:

WASHINGTON – A Democratic-proposed “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration is generating more partisanship in a Congress already filled with it.

Republicans are almost universally opposed, and President Barack Obama doesn’t appear to be enthralled with the idea either, saying at his first prime-time news conference he would consider the proposal but wants to look forward.

Sponsors said the commission could investigate who — in President George W. Bush‘s inner circle — drove the harsh interrogations and warrantless surveillance programs, and probe White House involvement in politically motivated hirings and firings in Bush’s Justice Department.

There is more to learn, since the Bush administration has kept many documents on these subjects secret and ordered three former White House officials not to testify before Congress. But Obama’s Justice Department also is resisting pressure to release those documents.

If Democrats in Congress proceed, it would be one more bruising political debate in a Congress that’s had plenty of them since convening last month….

The most outspoken champions of a commission to investigate the Bush administration are Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees. Both lawmakers plan to proceed, despite Obama’s comment.

“Investigations are not a matter of payback or political revenge,” said Conyers. “It is our responsibility to examine what has occurred and to set an appropriate baseline of conduct for future administrations.”

There’s “an oversight responsibility that has to be carried out,” Leahy said, adding that he wants to discuss the idea further with Obama.

Obama stopped short of quashing the idea, saying he would look at Leahy’s proposal.

“Nobody’s above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, then people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen,” he said. “But … generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in several statements, has backed continuing investigations of the Bush administration’s Justice Department.

“I think we have to learn from the past and we cannot let the politics of the Justice Department to go unreviewed,” she has said.

Pelosi has said that she doesn’t believe the positions of Conyers and Obama are very far apart on the need to continue investigations.

Leahy, who came up with the “truth commission” label, and Conyers, who already introduced a bill for a “blue-ribbon” panel, contended an investigative body outside Congress would take the investigation away from politics. Republicans countered it would do exactly the opposite — and they have the votes to kill it in the Senate with a filibuster.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked why Democrats need a commission to get information from a Justice Department now run by their own party.

“You just have to walk in and ask where the file cabinets are,” Specter said in an interview….

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who also voted for Holder, called the “truth commission” suggestion “this left-driven desire to prosecute people” over Bush’s anti-terrorism policies.

Another Republican, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, said the proposal makes Democrats vulnerable to allegations that they’re piling on after already spending years investigating the administration….

Sexy brainiac Glenn Greenwald already has written about the two-tiered “justice” system in the United States — one tier for stupid rich white men, who get away even with treason and mass murder, and another tier for the rest of us, who are actually held responsible for our crimes, even petty ones — so rather than write about that, I’ll refer to you Glenn (who, in his piece, writes about a desperate homeless man who stole a $100 bill but, after he felt remorse and returned the bill, still was sentenced to 15 years in prison).

I wholeheartedly disagree with President Barack Obama’s pussy assertion that prosecuting criminals for their crimes is “looking back” when we must “look forward.”

When is the last time that some poor black man got off the hook for even a misdemeanor because he urged the judge not to “look back” but to “look forward” and the judge actually fucking bought that “argument”?

If the criminals who comprised the Bush regime are not brought to justice, then there is no such fucking thing as justice in the United States of America. (Well, OK, so there isn’t any such fucking thing as justice in the United States of America, but you know what I mean…)

Of course the Repugnicans will scream “Politics!” at any and all attempts to bring their overprivileged, treasonous, felonious asses to justice.

So fucking what?

Let them scream “Politics!” all the way to prison, where they fucking belong.

Wingnut monkeyshines!

Associated Press graphic

Some people believe that this rather poor editorial cartoon that appeared today in the right-wing rag the New York Post is a racist comparison of President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee, and thus, by extension, a reference to the assassination of the president.

I think it’s more likely that it’s just a bad editorial cartoon.

The severe mauling of a woman by a chimpanzee (and the subsequent shooting to death of the chimp by police) in Connecticut on Monday is not something that I would choose to make fun of, but the wingnuts easily are able to laugh at others’ misery and pain and suffering (just like Jesus would do!).

Nor is the Post’s editorial cartoon very funny. The link of the passage of the economic stimulus package in our democratic process (the wingnuts always have to be reminded of that pesky little thing called democracy) to the chimp-mauling incident is a rather weak link (the editorial cartoonist, too, I surmise, is a rather weak link…).

However, I wouldn’t automatically assume that the cartoonist meant the dead chimp to represent President Obama. Hopefully, the editorial cartoonist was trying to say that the economic stimulus package, in his wingnutty opinion, is so poor that it must have been written by a chimpanzee (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!).

Years ago, when I worked on my university’s student newspaper, our editorial cartoonist drew an editorial cartoon on the topic of a proposed race-based student admissions policy. The tag line of the editorial cartoon went something like, “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo…” — the children’s rhyme that you use when you are picking something or someone.

Of course, the white-supremacist version of that would be “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo; catch a nigger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go; eeny, meeny, miny, mo.”

I knew the editorial cartoonist well enough to know that that that was not the intent of his cartoon; if memory serves, both he and I were thinking of the non-white-supremacist version, “catch a tiger by the toe.”

However, the cartoon nonetheless raised quite a lot of controversy among African-American students, as it should have.

I, as the managing editor who had to make too many decisions because the editor in chief was never around, should have caught the worst-case-scenario interpretation of the editorial cartoon and should have stopped its publication — or, better, asked the cartoonist to amend his cartoon in order to clarify his intent.

But I just didn’t see the ’toon in the white-supremacist light, and so the ’toon ran, and I, as the managing editor whose editor in chief in absentia ad nauseum didn’t want to handle anything unpleasant, had to (try to…) explain to the university’s enraged African-American students what the editorial cartoonist’s intent was. (Oh, what fun that was…) To this day I doubt that they believed my explanation.

Because of that personal experience, I will extend the benefit of the doubt to the Post, as loathesome as the Post is.

Running an editorial cartoon that just isn’t funny, however, is difficult to forgive…