Mauling a Metaphor Like a Sloth Bear Mauls a Monkey:
On Wednesday, the Rude Pundit asked for you to send you versions of the larger symbolic meaning of the story of the zoo in Amsterdam where a group of sloth bears chased, killed, and ate a macaque. And you responded with dozens of permutations of monkey, bears, and horrified onlookers. Here's some of the best (with minor editing so no one looks like too much of a fuckin' idiot for misplacing a comma or something):

Moeman of Canada goes all bloggy on it: "Joe Klein is the monkey. We find Macaque Joe sitting on his political perch picking pieces of what's left of his overrated pundit career from his bug infested beard. Monkey Joe used to swiftly and anonymously jump from Democratic vine to Republican vine but his last leap didn't quite make it and he fell into the fever swamped left blogosphere. Despite his ear-splitting screeches, the hungry boy and girl bears easily shredded the little runt."

Mike Hawk writes: "The monkey is Hillary; the bears are the rabid right-wing pundits like Malkin, Coulter, etc. They have been relatively quiet, taking the occasional nip at her; but once Hillary officially climbs up that rickety Presidential Candidate structure, they will really show their instinctive viciousness, knock her down and rip her to fucking shreds. And the zoo visitors, who will just sit and stare and thank God that it's not them, that would be the rest of the nutless gutless Democratic Party."

Longtime Rude reader CAG says: "I kinda like to imagine the bears as Patrick Fitzgerald and his band of merry attorneys and the monkey to be Karl Rove, vulnerable after visiting the bears one too many times. Tired of lame monkey antics, the bears decide to free themselves of the crazy monkey and satiate their appetites as well. But rather than a fevered feeding frenzy, the bears prepare Rove a la gourmet, with proper time and attention paid to the process of devouring the evil cretin in a painstakingly slow and civilized manner. The onlookers would be the rest of the scandal ridden administration, watching in horror as the bears finally rip the veil off their revenge-filled, evil-tainted, incompetent excuse for a government with every measured bite of monkey."

Flora and Tim (or one of them because it's so fucking sweet and trusting when two people share an e-mail address) go outside of DC to say: "The monkey’s the Dover, Pennsylvania School Board and the bears are voters, simultaneously proving that omnivorous ursine cave dwellers evolved from lower primates, or perhaps prehistoric ground sloths, into better equipped predators than mere macaque circus performers (or school board members) and that angry voters wakening from hibernation will bite your head off and eat you alive."

Joe gives us this bleak version: "The liberals are the monkey. The right-wing zealots are the bears. The bears have worked themselves up into a rabid frenzy, they're hungry for blood, not the kind with the quickly pre-killed taste, but the kind which carries the strong scent of fear. The monkey stands back, laughing, thinking that the bears are about to maul the shit out of one-another. The monkey forgets he's stuck in the same cage as those crazy fuckers. He forgets that, though bears may seem nasty and vicious and brave, they usually only pick on animals weaker than them - like monkeys. The bears all get together and devour the monkey. A short time later, they shit all over the cage (America) and roll around in it."

Iris (from Germany?) comes up with the Rude Pundit's favorite: "In my story Mary Cheney is the monkey. The bears are the Republicans with whom she has been living cosily for years. One day the bears decide the monkey's book about her life with the bears and the bushes is going too far, so they eat her....she's used to it."

More than one person went with the Patrick Fitzgerald/Karl Rove analogy, like Dan
And on it went, from grimly pathetic to pathetically hopeful. Mat says the monkey is reproductive freedom and the bears are the pro-life movement; Jack says the monkey's a monkey and the bears are Dick Cheney out hunting; for Zeke, the monkey's Bush, the bears moderate Republicans. While not the most violent, the most disturbing is David G.'s take: for him, the monkey's Rush Limbaugh, the bears are a gay hippie who wants to fuck Limbaugh. And then it gets weird. David of North Carolina makes Tony Snow the monkey and the press the bears, with lots of blood and shit-tossing.

The Rude Pundit'll post more in the next couple of days. But, since everyone of us in Left Blogsylvania oughta have our token conservatives, let's leave you with Anthony from Texas:
"The monkey is a monkey.
The bear is a bear.
The zoo is a zoo.
The Democrats are in shock.
The Republicans are wondering what PETA's reaction to all this is."