DANCING MONKEYS

Oh, good, a nice juicy chunk of political nonsense that doesn't involve Donald Trump!

The latest outrage: a political cartoonist from the Washington Post (Ann Telnaes) depicted Republican hopeful Ted Cruz's young daughters as dancing monkeys.

In the cartoon, Cruz is dressed as a kind of Santa-suited organ grinder; the monkeys are similarly attired. That they are "dancing" probably comes across better in the animated gif version.

Cruz is of course outraged, saying his kids are off limits. In fact, he's so far up on that high horse he's going to need a ladder to get safely down again. He thinks, apparently, the cartoon is about his kids.

He's wrong.

It's about how he turned his kids into dancing monkeys for political gain. If he hadn't done what he did, nobody would even know those monkeys were supposed to be his kids. (They're not labeled.)

The cartoon is in response to a television ad Cruz released that used his kids to attack Hillary Clinton over the "missing emails" flap. The eldest girl even takes on the persona of Clinton, saying she could do whatever she wanted with her personal email server and no one would be the wiser. (Insert bossy finger wagging here.)

I'd be surprised if that kid has developed an opinion of Clinton or the email issue, independent of her dad. And for that reason, it's reasonable to portray her as a monkey on a string, doing the bidding of her organ-grinding father.

The cartoonist could also have portrayed the daughters as marionettes, with Cruz holding the strings. The problem there is that the girls would have to have been drawn to resemble Cruz's kids, so you know who they are and what is going on in the picture. Organ-grinder monkeys are generic and require no further explanation.

On the other hand, the puppet version would have removed the "racist" ammunition from its Republican critics.

Cruz is Hispanic, see, and such people are frequently (and viciously) depicted as monkeys. Apparently. According to Republican critics. Or, at least, according to one particular Republican critic.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist, stretched herself mightily to produce ten reasons why the cartoon was inappropriate.

She appears to see nothing wrong with Cruz's political commercial, calling it "well written and well produced." In fact, she says the very fact it was well written and well produced was the reason some people objected to it.

(Clearly the only folks who might get upset are Democrats afraid the excellent quality of the ad meant it could be used effectively against them.)

Cruz (and Hemingway) see Telnaes's cartoon as merely an attack on the children—and call this unfair. Hemingway points out nearly all politicians use their children in their ads, so the fact Cruz used his does not make them fair game.

The use of the children per se is pretty much their only objection (along with the obvious racist stink about the monkey part).

At no time does Cruz (or Hemingway) recognize that the cartoon is not actually an attack on the children.

(Human beings see what they see and know what they know. You can't change that with dynamite.)

It's true many (most) politicians use their children in their campaign media, but usually they are just there as props in the image that portrays the man's family. They're displayed as living proof the guy possesses sperm and a willingness to use it. (Or, in the case of female politicians, once-viable eggs.)

But this is not what Cruz did. He put his kids to work, with a script, and had them (or at least the eldest one) act out a story skewering his Democratic rival.

We know the cartoon wasn't an attack on the kids because they're not shown as caricatures of themselves. One is bigger than the other, that's all. (Going with the "puppet-on-a-string" version would probably have required some amount of caricaturization.)

The kids are shown as monkeys because Cruz turned them into monkeys. For political gain. That's the point of the cartoon. The attack is on Ted Cruz, not his children.

My conclusion: It's a legitimate cartoon and should not have been removed.

And by the way, if Cruz attempts to use this flap (Cartoon-gate) to raise money, the drawing should be reissued, but now the monkeys are holding out buckets with dollar signs on 'em.

You reap what you sow, Ted.