Killing That Little Monkey

Well obviously it likens Obama to a monkey, playing on a long-standing African-American racist slur.

2. The cartoon is tying three things together (a real dying economy, a real monkey that ran amok in Connecticut the other day, and the racist stereotype of animalistic tendencies in blacks) to anticipate a recession-driven increase in crime and the need (paging Giuliani!) for some good old right-wing law-and-order. Yeah, two white cops. (Of course, this would have nothing to do with Eric Holder taking over the Justice Department and, among other things, bringing a critical eye to the prison-industrial complex, or more simply, the incarceration of black males for minor drug offenses.) …Economy in meltdown (perpetrated by white guys on Wall Street)? Play the fear card

3. What we have here, on the part of the NY Post, is a repeat of what Hillary Clinton did late in the primaries. Frustrated the contest was slipping away, she drew a connection between Obama’s nomination and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. (See BNN’s: Killing The Electricity.) In that case, she was trolling for votes by way of the scare tactic that Obama’s charisma, paired with his race, made him a less likely bet in terms of his “durability.” In this case, The Post is flat out playing on hate, taking aim at Obama (and blacks in general, as the monkey is black) by way of GOP hostility to the stimulus bill.

4. To the extent Bush was widely and broadly identified with the chimp (1, 2, 3, etc.), not to mention the historic destruction of the American economy, one very insidious thing the image does — in proposing/swapping Obama for The Chimpster — is to start to unravel the association