This was an incredibly crass cartoon – but it does raise the issue of which areas satirists will now have to avoid.

Steve Bell routinely portrayed aTony Blair as a cyclops: a no-go area now Gordon Brown is in charge.

He also portrayed George Bush as a chimp: again a no-no now.

I really don’t see what was wrong with it. The logic was pretty simple: the US stimulus bill is a bit of a mess; to say that it was written by a chimp is standard-issue hyperbole. It’s just a way of saying “wow, that stimulus bill sure was a bit of a mess”.

This harks back to, for example, the old joke about how a billion monkeys with a billion typewriters would, one day, accidentally type out the works of Shakespeare. This was a funny joke a year ago and it’s still a funny joke now.

Part of the joke is that nobody really knows who wrote the stimulus bill. It was being revised for a long time, and underwent a sudden, rapid revision shortly before being announced (Geithner had already committed himself to a Feb 9th deadline). So, the joke is that they must have just given up and given it to a chimp to write. Only now the police have shot the chimp. Ok, it’s hardly the most amazing satire ever, but it’s well within the bounds of normal political ‘humour’. The manufactured outrage over this is pretty damn silly.

I think they should apologize for a rather crap and unfunny cartoon.

It wouldn’t bother me if cartoonists started portraying Obama as a chimp, after all they did his predecessor. After all, there’s a long tradition of political cartoons being filled with invective, and if they were bland and inoffensive, they would lose their point.

It’s not like the Left doesn’t have a history of publishing cartoons which (probably unwittingly) flirt with racist imagery, particularly where Jews are concerned: Dave Brown’s Goya inspired cartoon of Ariel Sharon biting the head off a Palestinian baby has uncomfortable echoes of ‘blood libel’ and The New Statesman featured a cover with the Star of David piercing the heart of Europe; its also notable that the same papers which bottled it over the Motoons were happy enough to print the anti-Semitic cartoons produced in response.

The whole point of objection to the cartoon is unfortunately related to the police murder and brutality that is experienced in the Black community. There is still the unresolved issue of disproportionate incidents of Black men being murdered by police. Sean Bell, 51 bullets, Amado Diallo, 41 bullets, etc. Need I say more?