Below the Fold for Sept. 14

Let's check out some political stories we found Below the Fold:

Where's the Humor?

National Review magazine is protesting a cartoon about the California recall, drawn by Don Wright of the Palm Beach Post.

It depicts Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a toady of fellow justice Antonin Scalia (search). The magazine calls the cartoon, "One of the most racist and abhorrent political cartoons we have ever seen." So far, civil rights advocates have maintained a stony silence.

Second, consider a Sept. 11 cartoon in France's newspaper of record, Le Monde. The drawing attempts to draw an analogy between the coup that overthrew Chilean socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 and the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. In the same vein, The New York Times, once America's paper of record, carried a Sept. 11 editorial likening the 2001 attacks to -- you guessed it -- the 1973 coup in Chile.

And, consider this somewhat bewildering cartoon carried on the Al Jazeera Web site. We're not sure quite what it means -- but it obviously is meant to trivialize the Sept. 11 attacks and describe the war in Iraq as a grab for oil. This, from the network that commemorated Sept. 11 with an old bin Laden video and a tribute to a hijacker who died on United Flight 93.