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Is this cartoon racist? The Republican leaning New York Post, which is owned incidentally by Rupert Murdoch, claims this is just an innocent caricaturing of the shooting by two police officers in Connecticut of a mental chimpanzee that attacked a woman and a police officer.

Everyone else thinks it's a racist dig at Barack Obama. Given that the stimulus bill designed to kick-start the US economy was put together by Barack Obama, they appear to be suggesting the bill was written by a monkey no? That's how I see it anyways.

Fair enough, a lot of politicians are portrayed as monkeys or apes in cartoons because they're animals synonymous with being stoopid, but it is obviously a racial slur aimed at black people too and given that Barack Obama is black, the cartoonist must surely expect the message behind the cartoon to be questioned. Of course he did.

If someone drew a cartoon of Nicolas Sarkozy portrayed as a frog sitting in the mouth of Gordon Brown and tried to claim it was just a comment on how the French Prime Minister always leaves Gordon Brown speechless (frog in the throat - get it get it?), you might get away with it. French people on the other hand, might object to him being associated with frogs given that that is a xenophobic slur aimed at the French. Actually that idea is gold, I'm going to email into the Daily Mail when I've finished this.

Anyway, is this over sensitivity on the part of anyone who views this is a bigoted cartoon? Possibly, but since it appeared in a newspaper owned by Murdoch and was drawn by Sean Delonas who is in fact a racist homophobe with a history of offensive cartoons, it's far more likely that he's just taken the opportunity to call the President a monkey with a cartoon thinly veiled as political commentary.