Washington Post Explains Why 'The Boondocks' was in the Dock

Both their ombudsman and their readers don't like it.

An editor at Universal Press Syndicate, the distributor for "The Boondocks," says that The Post was the only newspaper to kill this series of strips. There were no calls or complaints about it from other papers, he says.

Once Post readers caught on, and caught up with the strip in other papers and Web sites, plenty of complaints were made -- against the paper. "We are grown-ups out here, not children," wrote one reader. "Pulling Boondocks was an insult to your readers and to Aaron McGruder," wrote another. "Has the Post become so timid as to refuse to run a comic strip that pokes fun at a member of the Bush administration?" another wrote. Many felt The Post was engaging in censorship, and that plenty of other comics and cartoons can be viewed as insulting to a public figure. "The Post has committed the cardinal sin of the humorless," added another. "It failed to recognize satire when it saw it. As the strip makes clear, we're laughing at the guy who suggested finding Condi a guy, not at Condi."

I may need a refresher course in sensitivity training, but I also found the sequence of strips within the bounds of allowable satire. I don't know a thing about Rice's personal life, nor do the characters in the strip, and I think readers understand that. The "Boondocks" characters, and their creator, were being mischievous and irreverent, in their mind's view of the world, about a high-profile public figure, and that seems okay to me.