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Silly, sick, demeaning cracks made by such as the canned Univision host Rodner Figueroa likening First Lady Michelle Obama to a Planet of the Apes character are not new. Four years ago, the then CEO of the Tennessee Hospitality Association, Walt Baker, took much heat and lost a lot of business for his marketing firm when he also likened the First Lady to a monkey. Four years later, a Belgian newspaper, De Morgen, went one, in fact, two better. Before Obama’s visit to the Netherlands in March 2014, it ran a Photoshop picture that depicted both Michelle and President Obama as apes. De Morgen was not just your run of the mill far right, shrill racially xenophobic European newspaper. It purported to be a progressive newspaper. Yet, despite its alleged politically enlightened stance, it apparently saw no contradiction in its ape imagery of the president and Michelle. In February 2009, New York Postcartoonist Sean Delonas ignited a firestorm with his casual depiction of President Obama as a monkey.
In the nearly five years between Baker and Figueroa’s idiotic pop-offs, with De Morgen sandwiched in between, the depiction, pillorying and vile spoofery of the Obamas as apes, monkeys and gorillas in the pack of race baiting websites, chat rooms, college frat parties, and student websites in assorted offbeat, crude, vile cartoons has become standard fare. That’s not an accident.
