To return to today’s cartoon, it’s also a curious message given the past rhetoric of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times’ publisher — who, according to the New Yorker, told his father that he was perfectly fine with American soldiers getting shot in Vietnam, because “it’s the other guy’s country,” and America shouldn’t be pushing its worldview on someone else by force. When Michelle Obama told NBC’s Jimmy Fallon on Thursday that “young people are knuckleheads,” perhaps this is what she was referring to. But apparently the older, if not yet wiser Sulzberger is perfectly fine with Americans to also be murdered at home for having alternative beliefs.

Yes, it’s a cartoon, and no person in his right mind is going to see it and be inspired to murder someone he disagrees with, and if media were to be created worrying about what the insane would do with it, there’s be no crime dramas on TV or slasher films in movie theaters, let alone political ads and cartoons. But the Times — and the rest of the left — temporarily forgot that message to bludgeon the newly resurgent right to death (pun intended) in early 2011.