Washington Post only paper to reject this week's Boondocks

[chascarrillo]

via NY Daily News (scroll down a couple items):

Rice (hold the spice)

Condoleezza Rice is a sticky subject at the Washington Post this week.

The paper has suspended "The Boondocks," a comic strip populated by cynical, politically aware African-American children, because of a series of jokes about the national security adviser's personal life. (You can read the banned comic in this newspaper.)

On Tuesday, cartoonist Aaron McGruder had one of his young characters speculate: "Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it."

<...>

The artist's rep told us yesterday, "Not a single other paper in the nation chose to abort this week's strip."

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/127456p-113972c.html

[amlouden]

1. here it is

this is a link to the cartoon

http://www.ucomics.com/boondocks/2003/10/14/

[tokenlib]

2. Does Condi have a good sense of humor??

I keep wondering how she is reacting to this.

[veganwitch]

3. im so glad i dont pay for my copy

i cancelled my subscription after the fcc ruling partially as general protest and partially because of their lack of coverage over it.

so i started taking the copy from the empty apartment down the hall (they apparently didnt cancel it) and when that ended i would take it if it was there when i came back from work. then i found extra copies (current) down by the garbage cans in my building. now i take the service exit out the door every morning so i can get my paper.

yeay for dumpster diving.

[Benhurst]

4. Surprise. Surprise. How could this happen at the "liberal"

Washington Post?

The Boondocks is the best comic strip in the country, far too good for a rag like The Washington Post.

Three cheers for Aaron McGruder! :toast:

[JNelson6563]

5. I love it!

Great toon!

Julie

[ant]

6. that is so silly

They rejected it because they had no way of knowing whether or not the claims in the comic strip were true? Give me a break.

I TOTALLY agree that speculating about a woman's personal relationship the way the strip has been doing is sexist, but the strip acknowledges that - that's part of the humor. This is like a zero-tolerance policy that can't take into account context, shades of grey, satire, etc. I'm surprised the people at the Post are being so dense on this. Lighten up, people!

[Cocoa]

7. maybe it was the spirit of Katherine Graham

didn't she have a reputation as an independent woman?

[RamboLiberal]

8. Anybody emailed the Post about this?

I did - here's letter I sent.

Just wanted to say I'm glad I'm not a subscriber to your paper. I think you were out of line to pull the witty, urbane and politically sharp Aaron MacGruder's comic strip Boondocks. I think he made a very valid point about the hawkiness NSA Condi Rice and her seeming lack of a male suitor. It does puzzle many of us out here if VP Cheney and Sec Rumsfeld plus the cabal of PNAC'ers in the Defense Department have not run roughshod over her and her seeming lack of control of policies swirling around her. Many of us have wondered that she seems to have no personal life and instead is almost always at Bush's side even on the weekends at Camp David and at the ranch in Crawford. I think pulling this strip this week and being the only newspaper in the country is an indictment of the butt-kissing your paper did to the Bush administration during the war. I was sorry to see Bob Woodward stoop to writing that glowing account of the Bush administration lead up to the Afghan war in his book with very little critical analysis of how their incompetence let Osama Bin Laden get away.

Thank goodness I can get Boondocks either through my local paper The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which didn't see fit to censor it or through the internet. You did your readers a disservice not letting them judge the column for themselves. I think when they take the office, officials are fair game to cartoonists who choose to satirize them.