Don’t tell me the editor of the New York Post didn’t know a cartoon depicting a dead chimpanzee as the author of the multibillion-dollar stimulus bill would cause an uproar. This was deliberate provocation. But why?

I realize that cartoonist Sean Delonas is infamous for his tasteless cartoons. He once portrayed Heather Mills with a wooden leg telling an arms dealer that she thought he was a legs dealer. I don’t think Paul McCartney’s ex-wife, who is an amputee, laughed a whole lot at that one. Another bad Delonas cartoon shows two men huddled in bed with an obviously disgruntled woman in the same bed a few feet away. One man is saying to the other, “Don’t mind her, she’s just a homophobe.”

But this time he has taken offensiveness to a new level. The chimp cartoon (shown at right being held by New York State Senator Eric Adams during a protest at the Post yesterday)  is so bad in so many ways. It portrays a chimpanzee with several bullet holes surrounded by white policemen. One of the policemen is saying, “Now they’ll have to get someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

It could be interpreted as comparing the nation’s first African-American President to a monkey because the bill was unarguably Obama’s brainchild. It could even be interpreted as advocating violence against President Obama.

My guess is that the people who own and run the Post knew it was offensive and wanted to enrage the black community. Why? Because they thought some white Americans would respond to black protests by charging the African American community with overreacting.

In the recent general elections, the American public rejected the right-wing politics of Post owner Rupert Murdoch. His Republican pals were kicked out of Congress and the White House. That’s why I think he and his minions cooked up a cartoon that was sure to set white Americans against black Americans.

It’s called divide and rule. And it’s the kind of thing people like Rupert Murdoch do.