This presidential campaign seems to be all about optics so here’s a good one. Although there is a loose prohibition against involving the kids of presidential aspirants in campaign mudslinging, it sometimes slips when someone in the party you don’t like does something stupid. In this case Ted Cruz put his two daughters (ages 5 and 7) into a video Cruz read Christmas stories to them with titles such as “How Obamacare Stole Christmas” and “Rudolph The Underemployed Reindeer.” This would seem to indicated that the children were well into getting into the political game but then Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Telnaes drew the above cartoon for the Washington Post and Cruz cried foul. Telnaes was unrepentant but the cartoon was quickly pulled form the Post.
https://twitter.com/AnnTelnaes/status/679323505326866433?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Michael Cavna at the Post has a piece discussing more of this and asking you what you would have done. Frankly when I heard that Telnaes drew the daughters as monkeys I thought that was a little low, but they aren’t caricatures, merely symbols. But, let’s keep this campaign civil. It would be terrible if insults and personal attacks were substituted for policy discussions.
Barack Obama used his children extensively in both his presidential campaigns, with a greater voter impact footprint than the Cruz girls. Now imagine those two beautiful girls depicted as monkeys.
Thought not.
Sorry, Jonah, in this case, Cruz actually created a video showing one of his daughters speaking lines harshly critical of Hillary Clinton. I challenge you to show me a similar piece of footage of one of Obama’s daughters saying _anything_ about one of his political opponents. If Cruz doesn’t want his kids in the line of political fire, he shouldn’t hand them a metaphorical gun.
By the way, good reporting, Heidi. Most of the mainstream news sources I saw comment on this story conveniently left out the part about Cruz’s commercial exploiting his kids as being the catalyst for the cartoon, and instead pretended that Ann Telnaes’ cartoon was entirely unprovoked. Looks like it takes the comics media to get it right. Again.
On Youtube you can find “the one percent” documentary, and w/in at 30 minutes or so, you will see how the Fanjul family is among the top contributors to both democrats, and republicans. Why do ‘Americans’/consumers in North America that pretend the USA still exist, and never bother to cooperate with each other, instead of rely on multinational corporate wealth? Maybe each of those monkeys were each a democrat, and republican? …naaaw, it was probably his kids, which was mean, because monkeys should be depicted that way,…
On Youtube you can find “the one percent” documentary, and w/in at 30 minutes or so, you will see how the Fanjul family is among the top contributors to both democrats, and republicans. Why do ‘Americans’/consumers in North America that pretend the USA still exist, and never bother to cooperate with each other, instead of rely on multinational corporate wealth? Maybe each of those monkeys were each a democrat, and republican? …naaaw, it was probably his kids, which was mean, because monkeys should not be depicted that way,…
Comments are closed.