02/18/2009 (8:12 pm)
The President, a Chimp? Say It Ain’t So… (Updated)
In the “Could they possibly become a greater parody of themselves?” department, Democrats in the news and blogging business are going berserk over a cartoon published in the New York Post today in the wake of Monday’s report of a rabid chimpanzee attacking a woman in Stamford, Ct. The cartoon shows two policemen who have just shot the chimp dead (which is what actually happened in the Stamford incident) saying “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
Hot Air catches Chris Matthews giving Congressman Gregory Meeks (D, NY) air time to slam that race card down hard. “Offensive.” “Horrific.” “What were they thinking?” Asks Matthews of his conservative Fall Guy, Rep. Dan Lungren (R, CA,) “Is the New York Post calling the President of the United States a chimp???” Huffpo, in an otherwise careful piece, cites Rev. Al Sharpton’s outrage.
I think Matthews is right on target, and it’s outrageous beyond belief. Can you imagine anybody with the disrespect, the incivility, the unmitigated dearth of humanity to call the President of the United States a chimp???
Jonathan Chait at the New Republic, to his credit, tries to quell the embarrassing nonsense, observing “sometimes a monkey is just a monkey.” But it’s too late. The hypocrisy is already out of the bag…
I can imagine some leftie objecting that “chimp” has historically been used to denote “African American,” so the reference is especially offensive (even though the cartoon recounts an actual, current news event, and even though the President did not write the stimulus bill, and even though the cartoon chimp does not look a thing like the President, and even though a million and a half references on the ‘net equate “chimpy” and “bush” in the same article.) Fine. Take another look at the Google graphic, above. Five million seven hundred thousand uses of the word “chimp” on the Internet. Think they should all be pulled?
UPDATE: The New York Post yesterday published a carefully-worded apology of which I completely approve. The apology went like this:
It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.
Period.
But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.
This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.
However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.
To them, no apology is due.
Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.
The dishonest press trumpeted that the Post had published an apology, failing utterly to distinguish between the apology to the dupes too naive to recognize that they were being played, and the absence of an apology to the partisan flacks who tried their best to make something out of nothing. They had to imagine they won, you see, but they didn’t. It’s long past due, and it’s beginning to occur: sensible people are pushing back against the race-mongering control freaks, and refusing to be whipped around by their faux outrage. Bravo, sez me.
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9 Comments »
Comment by Marc
Phil, you need to read Ann Coulters new book to understand the the word hypocrisy only exists in leftists dictionaries to describe conservatives of committing the act.
Comment by Phil
Hey, Marc,
I haven’t read the book, but I’m fairly sure Coulter knows that the word means a great deal more than that on the left. They use it to justify their own utter lack of morals: “Well, at least I’m not a hypocrite.”
You see, in the mind of the archetypal leftist, apart from the political sins (conservatism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and attempting to insert Christian principles into law) there are no sins at all; any act is acceptable, so long as one is “being oneself.” The only exception occurs if one has attempted to defend any moral precept; then, the mere appearance of even the slightest imperfection, combined with the attempt to defend a moral precept (which logically, according to their doctrine, requires that the person be completely perfect,) makes that person a Hypocrite, which everybody knows is the worst moral failing imaginable.
It’s an extremely common, extremely lame inversion produced by rationalization in the minds of those who have wholeheartedly abandoned any semblance of moral life and who actually know perfectly well that their own lives are bereft of virtue. I’m pretty sure Coulter understands this, and I imagine I’ve just replicated a morsel of her book.
Comment by Robert
Racism is in the eye of the beholder – at least in this case.
Of course, the true defintion of a hypocrite is someone who holds others to standards that they themselves do not believe in.
And since hypocrisy has been called “the tribute that vice pays to virtue” in the case of liberals, it is often true. Of course, accusing a liberal of being a hypocrite is a lot like accusing the sky of being blue, or the sun of being hot, or the ocean of being wet.
I’m pretty sure any honest definition of liberalism must include hypocrisy, not to mention immaturity, egotism, jealousy, and dare I say it? Covetousness!
Robert
Comment by snaggletoothie
Wouldn’t this bring up the question if calling Bush a chimp was demeaning to blacks? Or is it just taken for granted that the lefties that called Bush a chimp were going to make racist remarks regardless of what anyone said?
Comment by Mutnodjmet
The cartoon is based on an adage that even a monkey at a typewriter can write a Shakespeare Play given enough time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Great link, if you like math challenges!!!
Comment by Robert
When I took Statistics, our professor had actually worked up the numbers. It will never happen, he had an explanation for why, but it escapes me now…
Comment by Phil
Given infinity, any random thing will occur. The problem is, it’s increasingly clear that the universe is not infinite. In fact, the number of seconds in the history of the universe is not all that large a number, in astronomical terms, somewhere in the range of 10 to the 18th power, if I recall. The number of combinations in a non-ordered pattern of just 20 parts (order 20 units in any order, how many possible orders are there?) is roughly 10 to the 18th power. The number of combinations required to randomly order 30 parts (26 letters, space, period, comma, etc.) into how ever many thousands of words in groups of punctuated sentences would be necessary for a Shakespeare play is so far beyond the number of seconds in the universe as to make the calculation pointless — and that’s without considering how much gibberish we’d have to sort through to find the actual text. The monkey may succeed in some universe, but not in ours.
However, this gives me an excuse to produce one of my favorite quips from a book. The book was “The Cosmological Anthropic Principle,” by Tippler and Barrow, and I found a nifty quotation from it in a UNIX “fortune” program once that I copied out. I paraphrase:
“In an infinite and infinitely random universe, any event that occurs at one place, must also be occurring at an infinite number of places at the same time. While evaluating this statement is beyond the scope of this book, one thing is clear: if it’s true, it certainly is not original.”
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