The man with the baboon brain

Not to give it another moment under the sun, but I've got to return one more time to the NY Post cartoon lampooning the assassination of Barack Obama for the crime of writing a piece of legislation that conservatives can't abide. And it's all because the unbrilliant James Tarnto (of the Wall Street Journal, owned by Murdoch's News Corp, which also owns the NY Post) sets up a scenario so unflinchingly reeking with the unblemished purity of the conservative spirit that I owe you the opportunity to mock it on your own.

Okay, ready? Taranto addresses the racial issue, since the assassination aspect is fair game, and concedes that there are those who see Obama as a man of the negroid persuasion, and might feel that his depiction as a monkey was offensive in a way that similar portrayals of GWB were not. Okay, you go Jimmy.

"But what if someone is unaware of this? Suppose that a columnist or cartoonist is so innocent of racial prejudice that he has never even thought to make a connection between black people and lower primates? Such a person would be a racial kerfuffle waiting to happen. The moment he inadvertently employed an idea or image that carried offensive connotations, he would be pilloried as 'insensitive'."

Next up on Taranto: 'What if Superman and Jesus staged a fight to the death in a world where Kryptonite did not exist?'