Talk about bad judgment. The Concord Monitor ran an editorial cartoon bashing George W. Bush‘s position on Social Security. Fair enough, but the cartoon, drawn by Mike Marland, showed a plane labeled “Bush Budget” crashing into two towers labeled “Social Security.” Ugh.
Then the editor of the paper, Mike Pride, goes ahead and offers this explanation of why he ran the cartoon,
I thought that rejecting the cartoon would be censorship. The attack on the trade towers was a singular, devastating event, but my own reaction to the cartoon was not visceral.
Rejecting it would be censorship? So if his editorial cartoonist drew a sexually explicit cartoon Pride would be afraid to turn it down because that might be censorship?
Surely Pride would recognize that as being in poor taste. So how did he let this cartoon slip past?