It’s easy to understand why Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain, would take a dim view of a recent Washington Post cartoon depicting Senator Ted Cruz’ daughters as monkeys. But McCain sounded more traumatized than Cruz’ kids will ever likely be.
Fox’s Your World booked McCain to discuss the cartoon depicting Cruz as an organ grinder with two monkeys representing his daughters who had just appeared in one of his campaign ads. The choice of McCain preordained some conservative victimhood for Senator Cruz’s daughters. But surely Fox got more than it bargained for from McCain’s over-the-top reactions.
McCain began by calling for the editor and cartoonist to be fired immediately. “They haven’t even apologized to Ted Cruz or his daughters or his wife. It’s completely beyond the pale,” she said.
Host Neil Cavuto interrupted to note that The Washington Post pulled the cartoon, but that was not good enough for McCain.
MCCAIN: In the age of the internet, this is living on forever. …This will now be the part of these little girls’ narrative on the internet. When they grow up and Google themselves, they will now have this disgusting cartoon that comes up. The media doesn’t get to dictate politicians’ children’s narratives, which The Washington Post is trying to do.
Of course, there was a “double standard” whine.
MCCAIN: It’s a complete double standard. They would have never done something like this to Sasha and Malia Obama or, God forbid, Chelsea Clinton who, by the way, is a 35 year-old mother of two who stumps for her mother on the campaign trail. The media never hits her but it’s OK to do this to those little kids.
Apparently, it didn’t count when Fox News hosts baselessly suggested that Chelsea Clinton timed her pregnancy to help her mother’s election nor any of those FNC or FBN segments criticizing her for appearing on the cover of Elle magazine.
Then it was back to more over-the-top complaining about evil cartoon. McCain said her heart “really goes out to” Senator and Mrs. Cruz because McCain knows how “this can ruin your day.”
Cruz’ day couldn’t have been that bad. He immediately used the cartoon as a fundraising ploy, which nobody mentioned.
Instead, McCain went on another jag of suggesting that Cruz’ daughters had been irrevocably harmed: “Again, there are lifelong implications. You’re talking about two little girls and the rest of their life and the things that are going to come up in their Google search,” she said.
All this came less than two weeks after Cruz complained, during the December 15th debate, that “political correctness is killing people.” It’s also less than a year after Cruz announced his deep support for controversial, political cartoons as a vital part of democracy.
But that was when Muslims were being ridiculed by Charlie Hebdo. Now that Cruz’s daughters are on the receiving end, it’s a whole different story.
Watch it below, from the December 23 Your World.