WaPo Gone Bananas with Political Correctness?

Incredibly ridiculous.

There's no other way to describe the over-the-top political correctness that leads a major newspaper to issue a prophylactic apology for an unoffensive cartoon in the anticipation that someone somewhere will raise a fuss.

Yet that's what the Washington Post did yesterday in a correction posted on page A2 of the Sunday edition (via Jossip):

So Gene Weingarten from The Washington Post wrote an article called "Monkey Business" about men and women and their sexual fluidity, based on that New York Times trend piece from a couple weeks ago. But since the title of the article had the word "monkey" in it, and the accompanying picture was of a cartoon monkey, WaPo needed to clear up any misconceptions vis-a-vis The Post cartoon and our current president.

The headline, illustration and text of "Below the Beltway," a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may cause offense to readers. The magazine was printed before a widely publicized incident last week in which a chimpanzee attacked and badly mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn. In addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that The Post does not countenance. We regret the lapse.

You know, it took the Post about 4 days to sorta-apologize for their monkey comic. WaPo's correction was printed the same day as the cartoon. That's how you know they printed it on purpose to drum up controversy.

For his part, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz confessed on his Twitter page that he was confused as to why the Post felt it necessary to issue an apology (posted to his page shortly after 1:30 p.m. EST today):

@michellemalkin I thought my paper's preemptive apology for Monkey Business cartoon was odd. Didn't seem offensive to me.