It only took 70-some days for the following complaint to come in.

The newspaper’s editorial cartoons are too harsh, too tough, unfair and demeaning to President Obama — or so says a reader. Is this Groundhog Day or what? Didn’t I just go through an eight-year running battle with readers who said the same thing about the cartoons we ran that lampooned President Bush?

The reader took serious exception to the cartoon that ran in today’s paper. As you can see, it shows Michelle and Barack Obama offering a “fist bump” to Queen Elizabeth. “At best it is in very poor taste; at worst it is a mean-spirited racial slur against the president of the United States and his wife,” my letter-writing acquaintance stated. “I have instructed my secretary to call today and cancel my subscription to what I have lately referred to as the ‘Redneck Rag,'” he said.

Well.

It seems that Democratic and Republican partisans have something in common after all: They hate it when “their guy” becomes the object of cartoonists’ humor.

These cartoons go with the high office they occupy. I do not believe for a single second that President Obama is upset with this cartoon, any more than I thought that President Bush got hot and bothered over the cartoons that lampooned him. These folks run for office expecting to be blistered by cartoonists.

The problem, though, lies with their devotees who haven’t yet developed the kind of rhino hide required to view these illustrated commentaries for what they are: attempts by the artists, in the age-old journalistic tradition, to “comfort the afflicted the afflict the comfortable.”

And so, the argument with hyper-sensitive readers goes on.