Ok, here is what I think. You must view this cartoon in relation to the recent chimpanzee attack in CT.

I don't think the cartoonist was deliberately trying to link the chimpanzee to Obama. Instead, he is expressing an opinion (not mine, btw) about the haphazard construction of the stimulus bill. It's a reference to the old saying about putting monkeys in front of typewriters to produce a novel.

That being said, the toon should not have been published because the editors and even the cartoonist should have been sensitive to the fact that it COULD be interpreted as another variation on the "Blacks are like apes" line of racial epithets.

It doesn't matter what was REALLY meant. In this day and age, you don't publish something like that which on the surface could seem blatantly racist when divorced from its context.

This isn't worth getting too worked up about, however. We should save our fight for the big battles.