AUSTIN, Texas (AP) _ Gov. Rick Perry is expressing “disgust and disappointment” at a cartoon in a California newspaper that depicts him boasting about business booming in Texas just before a major explosion.
The cartoon in The Sacramento Bee shows Perry crowing that “Business is Booming” and flanked by sings saying “Low Tax” “Low Regs!” The next panel reads “Boom!” as an explosion engulfs the area behind the governor.
An explosion last week at a fertilizer plant in West killed 14 people and injured 200 others.
In a letter to the Bee’s editor Friday, Perry said he wouldn’t stand for “someone mocking this tragedy.” He demanded an immediate apology for the newspaper’s “detestable attempt at satire.”
Fellow Republican and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst called for the firing of the artist, political cartoonist Jack Ohman.
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Jack Ohman wrote on his blog after his cartoon was published, stating in part:
“My job, as I understand it, is to be provocative. I provoke, you decide. I don’t dictate, I put out my opinion along with everyone else. I sign my name. I own it. In my opinion, I could have gone further. Much further.
Does this cartoon disrespect the victims? Their families?
Well, if someone, say a Texas regulator, had picked this up before 2013 but after 2006 (the last time there was a state inspection of the plant), maybe I wouldn’t have had to draw that cartoon. No victims, no grieving families. So my rather pointed view of all this would be moot.
Gambling with the lives of innocent people is much more offensive to me.
That’s way worse than tasteless.
It’s reckless.”
