Sean Delonas' Cartoon 2/18/09

Sean Delonas is no stranger to ire. Indeed if his years-long roster of incendiary cartoons for the New York Post are any indication, he lives for it.

There was Freddy Ferrer kissing Al Sharpton’s butt in 2001. The sheep all dressed up for a wedding after same-sex marriage passed in New Jersey. The Muslim terrorists cheering for the Democratic midterm wins in 2006.

Delonas has penned so many apparently anti-gay cartoons that he’s become practiced at denying he’s a homophobe (homophobe? He’s far more likely a homo-something-else considering how obsessed he is with all things gay but that’s for Sean, his therapist, and his closet to discuss).

Yep, the guy’s a dick. But this time he’s actually doing Barack Obama, Democrats, liberals, and African-Americans a favor. Stay with me.

First the cartoon: The dude can’t draw. Right? And what does a crazy story about cops in Connecticut shooting an enraged pet Chimpanzee as it attacked a woman have to do with the stimulus bill? Think hard.

The Post’s $600K/year (in 2005 according to NY Mag) editor, Aussie Col Allan, hazarded a guess: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy.”

Maybe in Oz, at a bar, after a couple of bottles cases of Coonawara Shiraz that make sense but here in New York you gotta do better than that.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, whose been pissed at Delonas plenty of times in the past, had his own take: “The cartoon in today’s New York Post is troubling at best, given the racist attacks throughout history that have made African-Americans synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual inference to this form of racism when, in the cartoon, the police say after shooting a chimpanzee, ‘now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill.’ Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama (the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder whether the Post cartoonist was inferring that a monkey wrote it?”

What’s incredible is that Al is actually asking if Delonas meant to been racist. He never bothered with those pleasantries in the past. What’s going on?

Here’s why this is a good thing for Obama, et al. Conservatives have not yet figured out how to fight back after their disastrous showing in November. Remember Rush Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” speech before Inauguration Day? Liberal hands wrung with worry that the Republicans were going to “do a Clinton” on Obama.

Then there was all the anti-stimulus rhetoric — “pork pork pork!” Congressional Republicans shouted until they were hoarse (and many still are…shouting…and hoarse). But Obama got his stimulus bill and Americans think it’s a good bill that will work by roughly the same margin as Obama’s margin of victory in November.

Now Delonas adds his own inciteful commentary to the mix. And the result? Republicans and conservatives look like petulant children who care more about themselves than the good of the country (Rush). Republicans and conservatives look like they care more about their own failed economic theories than they do about fixing the economy (Congressional Repubs and their columnist/talk radio friends). At least the house organ of Republicans and conservatives (NY Post) looks like it thinks depicting black people as primates is totally appropriate (Delonas and Allan).

That’s the old playbook for the old electorate. This is not 1968 (George Wallace). It’s not 1988 (Willie Horton). It’s the year after 2008 when a broad majority of Americans (many of whom were too young to vote in 1988 and most of whom were too young to vote in 1968) elected America’s first African-American President.

Delonas isn’t so much offensive as he is outdated. Cartoonist 1.0 in a 8.0 world. And even Al Sharpton seems to recognize it’s better to get out of the way when your enemies are in the process of destroying themselves.