Ted Cruz Blasts Washington Post Cartoon of Daughters

Washington Post editors bowed to public outrage and issued a retraction after political cartoonist Ann Telnaes published a disgusting attack on Ted Cruz, depicting his young daughters as trained monkeys.

The cartoon, which portrayed Cruz as a Santa suit-clad organ grinder, and his two daughters as dancing monkeys, was removed with an editor’s note explaining it’s the newspaper’s policy to leave children out.

Hiatt said: “I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published”.

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz launched an “emergency” fundraising appeal after the Washington Post ran an animation online showing his daughters as monkeys. “Stick w/ attacking me-Caroline & Catherine are out of your league”.

Some readers voice support of the Pulitzer-winning Telnaes, while others agree with Hiatt’s decision, with some of those critics contending that the cartoon is racist or applies a double standard compared with prominent children of Democratic politicians.

The ad that inspired the cartoon features Cruz – who once read Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” from the Senate floor during a filibuster – reading faux holiday stories to his daughters, with political titles like “How Obamacare Stole Christmas”.

Cruz then thanked Rubio for coming to his defense. “The Post saying the kids are “fair game” is even worse”, he tweeted. Telnaes acknowledged that the children of politicians are typically off-limits, but wrote that the ad – in which “his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic” – made a depiction of the daughters “fair game”.

Despite the retraction, hundreds of comments have been posted to the page that originally bore the offending comic, the vast majority of which are critical of both the Washington Post and the cartoonist.

The brouhaha could prove to be a fundraising magnet for Cruz, who has a strong base of low-dollar donors.