On Wednesday, the same day that Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that "we are a nation of cowards" when it comes discussing race, The New York Post published its now-notorious chimp/stimulus cartoon. Like many editorial cartoonists, Sean Delonas lamely juxtaposed a political story (the stimulus program approved by Congress and signed by President Obama) and a non-political  sensation (the mauling of a Connecticut woman by a chimpanzee, who was later shot to death by police). The cartoon showed two police officers, one with a smoking gun, looking at a chimp lying in a pool of blood. One cop says to another: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

The connection between the stimulus bill and the chimp attack was tenuous and tasteless, but was it racist? In my previous existence as an editorial page editor, I spiked a few cartoons because of likely offense to a segment of our readership. I'm not sure I would have killed this one, at least on those grounds. To me it was obvious that the monkey was supposed to represent the Washington establishment that produced the unwieldy legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. If a weasel had been shot for attacking a woman, the cartoonist might have transformed him into a symbol of fiscal trickiness (instead of ape-like stupidity).

When I read that the cartoon was being denounced for representing Obama as a chimpanzee, my initial reaction was that the objection was preposterous. I was confirmed in that reaction when I heard that the Rev. Al Sharpton was calling for a boycott of the Post.

I raised the subject with other members of The Times editorial board and encountered a mixture of angeement and disagreement along with some insights that hadn't occurred to me. One colleague wrote: "Welcome to the brave new world . . .  Criticisms of the president are going to be interpreted as racist attacks (or, in the case of this cartoon, criticisms of policies the president backs are going to be interpreted as racist attacks, if the cartoonist is boneheaded enough to involve a monkey). I’m not sure what the solution to this is, except that critics are going to have to be more careful with their words and images. Ultimately, it may not be a bad thing, because it will lead to an ongoing dialogue about race and symbology. But it’s going to be ugly. . ."

Another colleague, an African-American, pointed me to some truly offensive images of Obama as a monkey, including an ad for a T-shirt showing Obama thinking about a banana. Her argument -- and not just hers -- was that the cartoon had to be viewed in the context of an ugly tradition of likening blacks to apes. She had a point. My problem wasn't with the idea that a cartoonist shouldn't depict the first black president as a chimpanzee -- though that fate befell George W. Bush -- but that it was a ridiculous reach to regard the chimp in the cartoon as an Obama surrogate, let alone an allusion to a racist stereotype. 

Which brings me back to Holder's speech. He's correct that lots of Americans (though not, fortunately, our editorial board) are shy about engaging in interracial discussions about racial attitudes. The hesitation obviously exists among both whites and blacks, but I'll mention an example of what Holder would call white cowardice.

Many white Americans believe that some denuciations of "racism" by figures like Al Sharpton are exaggerated and self-serving, but they won't say so. Sometimes such shyness stems from a laudable recognition that African-Americans have been subjected to so many real outrages that a false alarm here and there should be overlooked. But I fear that some of the silence reflects a belief that the sort of dialogue Holder was urging is impossible and that it's futile to try to convince African-Americans that one of their "leaders" is wrong.  That strikes me as more racist than a silly cartoon.

Eye-colored eyes, a McGough family feature

The Times' oped page ran a compelling article today questioning an offer by the Los Angeles-based Fertility Institutes to allow prospective parents to choose the "eye color, hair color and complexion" of their offspring. Using in vitro fertilization technology to ensure that your kids look like "The Boys from Brazil" is pretty creepy. But what struck me about the pitch for designer babies was the priority given eye color.

I have struggled for years to understand why the color of someone's eyes -- especially if it's blue -- looms so large in journalism, fiction and poetry. Sometimes blue eyes are a synonym for "Caucasian," as in "blue-eyed soul." More often, blue eyes are pulled out of the feature writer's tool box (a disturbing image) to tug at the heartstrings of readers....

When the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist underwent surgery for thyroid cancer in 2004, reporters who covered the court -- me included -- had to decipher an opaque press release about his illness. The release said that Rehnquist had been given a tracheotomy "in connection with a diagnosis of thyroid cancer." But it didn't specify the type of thyroid cancer, forcing reporters to conduct hurried surveys of cancer specialists willing to speculate about the seriousness of Rehnquist's condition.

A similar scavenger hunt occurred in 2007 when Rehnquist's successor, John G. Roberts Jr., suffered a seizure while on vacation. Doctors and journalists alike had to speculate about whether Roberts would be prescribed anti-seizure medicine.

Even so, Americans knew more about these episodes than they  did about the senility of previous members of the court until it was documented by the historian David Garrow.

Which brings me to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose surgery for pancreatic cancer was disclosed Thursday -- the same day it occurred. The statement from the court was brief but detailed, including the information that a "Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan revealed a small tumor, approximately 1 cm across, in the center of the pancreas."

As with Rehnquist and Roberts, Ginsburg was soon the subject of speculative news stories, but in her case there was less of a guessing game. That's as it should be. Justices are known for their love of privacy -- Justice David Souter once said that "the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body" -- but they're important public officials and the state of their health ought to be a matter of public record.

* Photo of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Getty Images

The Times editorial board was poised Tuesday to advise Tom Daschle to withdraw as President Obama's nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, but then Daschle mooted the issue by pulling his own ripcord. Undeterred, the board advises Daschle today not to let the door hit him on the way out of the Obama inner sanctum. Distinguishing him from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose payroll-tax problems drew a more forgiving response, the board writes:

The problem with Daschle’s nomination ... went beyond his tax returns. After losing his reelection bid in 2004, Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats, spent four years doing what many former officeholders do: cashing in on his connections.

Tut tut tut. The board also pooh-poohs the latest hostage release by Colombia's FARC rebels ("a stunt") and urges the House of Representatives to approve a Senate bill to create 700,000 acres of new wilderness in California.

Over on the Op-Ed page...

Any promotion is good promotion, right? So we’d like to thank our friends out their in cyberspace who link to our humble newspaper -- even if the link-love is not always to promote our content, but to condemn it.

As Barack Obama took his oath of office last week, it seemed the whole world was watching the historic moment with bated breath. Then the flub heard around the world happened, and Patt Morrison took to cyberspace to share her thoughts -- and people were reading. FindLaw's Common Law blog discussed whether Obama should retake the oath and noted Morrison's inclusion of the not-known-to-most tidbit that the oath language prescribed by the Constitution does not include "so help me God." Ever since FDR's inauguration, presidents have simply volunteered the phrase themselves. Others referenced us for noting that the Constitution doesn't even require a president to take the oath. But they weren't the only ones to examine the flub.

If the infamous oath incident weren't enough to draw webbies to our blog, Michael McGough's odd discovery that Pope Benedict XVI has his own YouTube channel -- yes, it's true -- got us noticed.

And former Opinion staffer Amina Khan's July 2008 post on whether then-Sen. Obama's vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will come back to haunt him was a picked up recently by Under the Radar Media.

The Times' editorial page concludes its series on the Bush presidency with an editorial cataloging the outgoing chief's few successes and many failures -- such as his alienating go-it-alone response to post-9/11 terror policy and his self-fulfilling prophecy that Iraq would become the focus of the fight against terrorism.

Like the war that came to define it, Bush’s presidency conceivably could be viewed more favorably by historians than it is by the nation that looks forward expectantly to his retirement on Tuesday. But our verdict today is that, despite some important accomplishments, the Bush years were a time of squandered opportunities, shocking abuse of power and cynical abandonment of both legal principles and historical values.

The page also has some more to say about Jessica's Law in the wake of a report by a state panel that the law -- 2006's Proposition 83 -- doesn't work. We don't want to say "We told you so," but -- wait. Actually, we do want to say "We told you so." Because we did, here, here, here and here.

But when being right isn't enough, we can try for a bailout. USC Annenberg School of Journalism Director Geneva Overholser and former USC Annenberg School for Communication professor and former dean Geoffrey Cowan offer some ideas on how the government could help the newspaper industry, or at least journalism, catch up with the rest of the world.

Joe Hicks offers his take on the Oakland outrage against the BART shooting. And Gustavo Arellano fits Rick Warren into the long tradition of Orange County conservative evangelical Bible-thumping.

When Warren endorsed Proposition 8 last year, and seemingly endorsed bombing Iran when he told Sean Hannity that it was fine to punish "evildoers," he shed his sheep’s clothing and bared the conservative fangs long associated with Orange County, much to the detriment of his ecumenical standing.

Arellano says Warren "has the chance to redeem Orange County as a place not of avarice but of altruism, and to show that evangelical Christianity can come free of politicking and show genuine concern for all."

Photo: Ron Sachs/EPA

...or was that "The Matrix Reloaded"? Whatever. Start with today's Wall Street Journal (note that there are photos, not dot drawings, of President Bush) and move to today's Times. And then move on to the New York Times. And then the Washington Post. Two Bushes, three, six, nine. Why, or why, didn't we take the blue pill?

What is a crucial part of a nation’s culture, makes you fearful on your first encounter, hits you with an unexpectedly strong flavor, stays with you for days, compels you to repeatedly shower and brush your teeth just to wash away the scent, makes you swear off trying it ever again, yet leaves you pining for more?

The election, of course. The editorial pages show you no mercy. Deal with it.

First, you don’t get out of voting just because you heard some cable network declare the winner based on exit polls in West Virginia. The editorial board reminds you that you’ve got ballot measures to vote on here, and besides, the polls may be wrong. They’ve been wrong before. And if you don’t vote, we’ll find you.

Civics-bookish as it may sound, voting is a duty as well as a right. Even when the stakes aren't as high as they are in California this year, exercising the franchise only when you think your vote will 'count' is an act of selfishness, not citizenship.

So you better do your duty. Of course, even if you do, everything will probably go wrong. States have to check names against registration databases, but there are no standards, so the double-check may bounce qualified voters in some states while failing to catch fraudulent ones in others. States have differing rules for provisional ballots. And they might not come up with enough poll workers, especially in poor and minority precincts. Congress should do something. But it probably won't.

And in case you haven’t yet gotten the message about who and what to vote for, we'll give it to you one last -- OK, second-to-last -- time.

Now, let Larry M. Bartels of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs explain to you why, whatever your rationale for choosing your candidate, you're wrong. And don't be so sure that things will come out right in the end, just because millions of people are voting.

Unfortunately, "rational" rewarding and punishing of incumbents turns out to be much harder than it seems, as my colleague Christopher Achen and I have found. Voters often misperceive what life has been like during the incumbent's administration. They are inordinately focused on the here and now, mostly ignoring how things have gone earlier in the incumbent's term. And they have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country's well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not.

So after all that election news, it's time to cheer up. H. Gilbert Welch says all that testing for breast cancer may not be the best thing for most women, at least not the way it's done now.

"Look harder, find more" has been the prevailing paradigm in breast cancer screening from the outset. News reports focus on which approach finds more cancer. Conventional versus digital mammograms? Digital is better because it finds more cancer. Mammograms versus MRI? MRI is better because it finds more cancer. But the problem of over-diagnosis means that finding more cancer is not better — it’s the wrong way to measure progress. Real progress would be to find only the cancers that matter.

And now to the kimchi. We certainly couldn't find anything in that to make you worry. Or could we? Gregory Rodriguez points out that South Korea has a deficit of the pungent, fermented national appetizer/condiment. Koreans are eating Kimchi imported from China, and that could lead disaffected citizens to question their cultural hold on something dear to them. Could they be facing confusion, a sense of displacement, anxiety? And who knows where that could lead?

If you think these are silly questions, just remember that it was a feeling of cultural displacement that helped fuel the fundamentalism of Egyptian student Mohamed Atta in Germany.

Happy Monday!

Kimchi photo: Rhee Dong-Min, Reuters

Columnist Gregory Rodriguez today offers what, with any luck, will be the Op-Ed page's last take on the lipstick-on-a-pig squabble between the McCain-Palin campaign and Barack Obama. To Rodriguez, it's a sign of the GOP's descent into the politics of victimhood that conservatives have long decried. And unlike the liberal spin on victim politics, which is based on economic populism, the current Republican version is based on cultural divides, Rodriguez writes:

The enemies list is made up of professors, public intellectuals and entertainers, not captains of industry. And without any real redress in mind, conservative populism is all about emotion and personal grievance, not righting any particular social or economic wrong. You'd think the rise of conservative media, eight years of a conservative administration and a conservative-leaning Supreme Court would have undermined the GOP's victim strategy -- they are in power, which is one way to define "elite."

Ahh, another day, another flood of angry responses. If you feel victimized by Rodriguez's column, please fill in the comment box below.

Elsewhere on the page, Francesca Ratner sinks into the complexities of Prop. 4, an initiative to require a parent or other adult relative to be notified before a minor's abortion, and unearths a maze of red tape, humiliation for pregnant teens and potential lawsuits. And Brookings economist Rebecca M. Blank calls for Congress to update the way poverty is measured in America to better reflect government aid programs, regional differences in the cost of living and new spending patterns.

On the editorial side of the ledger, the Times' editorial board blasts a bill by state Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) to protect Indian casinos against competition from charity-sponsored bingo:

It's more than a little troubling to see the haste with which lawmakers, who receive huge donations from tribes, rush to do their bidding. The state had been in the process of determining the legality of charity bingo machines, but Cedillo's bill would end that discussion. Californians should demand to see it reopened.

The board also notes how United Airlines' investors were ill served by the Internet's power to distribute bad information. And it urges U.S. policymakers not to overreact to Venezuela and Bolivia expelling American ambassadors, which would only play into the hands of leaders Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales:

Did somebody announce we are at war with Latin America and forget to tell us? The expulsion of the ambassadors came seemingly without provocation, and the notion that President Bush is plotting an invasion is laughable. Yet for Chavez and Morales, provoking the United States serves two purposes: It distracts domestic attention from their disastrous policies and could, they hope, produce an overreaction in kind from Washington that would further their interests.

A few years ago I shook my head when a much younger colleague -- now a rising star at The Times -- included what seemed to me a gratuitous piece of information in a political story. Reporting on a rumble in the Senate over Democratic filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominations, she noted: "The fight between Republicans and Democrats inflamed passions to the point where Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, the third ranking Republican, drew parallels between the 'hubris' of Democrats and that of German dictator Adolf Hitler."

"As opposed to all the other Hitlers?" I asked myself at the time, shifting into middle-aged-cranky mode. Who didn't know that Hitler was a German dictator? Would we have to begin referring to Jesus as "the first-century religious teacher whom many believe to have risen from the dead"? Or the Civil War as "a 19th century conflict between North and South over slavery"?

I had the same reaction -- only stronger -- this week when I read a Reuters story about a federal appeals court  overturning the kidnapping and conspiracy conviction of a former Ku Klux Klansman charged with holding two black men at gunpoint while companions beat and killed them in 1964. The story included this helpful historical aside:  "The secret group, known for its white robes and pointed hoods, formed in the U.S. South after the Civil War to reassert white supremacy and enforce racial segregation, terrorizing blacks with lynchings, cross-burning and murders."

Oh, that Ku Klux Klan!

But maybe I'm judging the Reuters reporter unfairly. In the 1959 edition of "The Elements of Style" -- the usage bible I first encountered in high school -- E.B.White argued for spelling out the full names of organizations like the NAACP because babies were being born all the time who one day would scratch their heads over what the letters stood for. Later editions removed the NAACP example, perhaps because "colored people" had become politically incorrect. But White's point about showing consideration for new generations of readers is a valid one. A baby was born today who doesn't know what "lol" means.

Instead of bewailing the fact that some newspaper readers don't know that Hitler was a dictator or that KKK members wore pointed hoods, maybe I should be grateful that these whippersnappers are reading the newspaper at all. Or perhaps I should say: "reading the newspaper, a primitive precursor of the Internet made of wood pulp."