I've received some requests, asking after my opinion on the whole Sean Delonas/chimpanzee cartoon issue. Well, to put it simply, I think that Daniel Radosh -- as he often does! -- has captured the matter best:
As for the controversy itself, I have to say that I've been reading Sean Delonas for many, many years, and his offensive cartoons are not usually nearly this subtle. The fact that people even have to ask, "Did he mean to convey...?" suggests to me that he probably didn't. My gut feeling is that Delonas saw a story about a monkey (as he would likely have thought) and his hack brain leapt right to "a monkey could have..." after which he plugged in the default "THING DEMOCRATS HAVE RECENTLY DONE" parameter. Several people have pointed out that Obama didn't even write the stimulus bill, but to me that's less relevant than the belief that Delonas' hack circuits trump his racist ones (though not his homophobic ones, obviously). Maybe he did intend the racist overtones, or at least notice them later. Maybe he didn't. Either way, the deeper fault here lies with the editor who failed to realize that regardless of Delonas' intent, people would take it that way, with some justification, and that it shouldn't have run.
Via Romenesko, cartoonist Ted Rall is a bit more sympathetic:
Rall, who is familiar with Delonas' work, said he doesn't believe the cartoonist was saying anything about Obama. "It's about his economic advisers who wrote the stimulus bill, and they're a bunch of white guys."
Yet he also criticized the cartoon because it doesn't have a message. Delonas, he said, was employing a common editorial cartoonist technique of tying together two unrelated stories "and forcing these square pegs into round holes."
Such cartoons are "rarely clever" and "don't mean anything," he said, adding that many of his colleagues admit as much when such work is featured in major publications. "The reason cartoonists do them is because editors always print them, and when you do serious, hard-hitting stuff, it doesn't run."
Radosh adds, "What I will point out is that as far as I can tell, every media outlet that has expressed outrage over this inexcusably offensive cartoon is, nonetheless, reprinting it for their own readers to see and evaluate. That's as it should be -- and as it wasn't when the cartoons were only offensive to Islamic fundamentalists." And I agree with that, too.