About 200 people gathered outside the NY Post's offices in midtown Manhattan to protest the Sean Delonas-drawn editorial cartoon showing a dead chimp, shot by police who say, "They'll have to find someone else to write next stimulus bill." The protesters shouted, "Shut down the Post! Shut down the Post!"
WCBS 2 reports that Reverend Al Sharpton said, "Here, you have someone using race-tinged cartoons to racially offend the president...This inference is something that is divisive, something that is offensive and something that should not be quietly accepted," calling it worse than Don Imus's remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team. And NAACP president Hazel Dukes said, "I'm outraged that they'd have the audacity to use this cartoon and not think that it would have an impact for people…how in the world do you have the audacity?"
Post editor in chief Col Allan defended the cartoon yesterday, saying, "It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist." And Delonas spoke to CNN, saying the controversy was "absolutely friggin' ridiculous...Do you really think I'm saying Obama should be shot? I didn't see that in the cartoon." Daily News columnist Michael Daly thinks his rival paper should apologize: "The cartoon's conscious intent may have been to say the stimulus bill as written by Congress is such a mess it could have been penned by a monkey. But say 'stimulus' to readers and they rightly think 'Obama.' He is as much a personification of the package as FDR was of the New Deal."
Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, says that Sharpton and director Spike Lee will "lead members of the National Action Network in showing their disgust and outrage by dumping papers outside the New York Post' Doorsteps on Friday at 5:00 p.m." Tonight, there's a strategy session at the NAN headquarters (106 West 145th Street at Lenox Avenue).
