Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz took to Twitter Wednesday to slam The Washington Post after an editorial cartoon lampooned his young children after they appeared in a Christmas parody commercial that ran during last week's "Saturday Night Live" in Iowa.
Here's the Texas senator's post:
Both the Post and The New York Times have long had liberal editorial pages and generally support Democrats.
Cruz's response was the latest salvo in a battle with the Post after cartoonist Ann Telnaes depicted Cruz's daughters — Caroline, 7, and Catherine, 4 — as monkeys leashed to their father's organ-grinder in a
cartoon published on Tuesday.
Telnaes said that she created the image because Cruz used "his children as political props" in the commercial, which spoofed several classic Christmas stories to ridicule Democratic policies and scandals.
She acknowledged that "there is an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician's children are off-limits."
The cartoon was pulled after strong reader backlash and was replaced with a note from Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt saying that "I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published."
"I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree," he said.
At a campaign stop in Tulsa, Cruz said that the Post's attack had "no place in politics."
"Not too much ticks me off, but making fun of my girls, that'll do it," he said,
NBC News reports.
"It used to be for a long time the rules across the board that kids are off limits," the first-term senator added. "That should be the rules."
"Don't mess with our kids. Don't mess with my kids. Don't mess with Marco's kids. Don't mess with Hillary's kid. Don't mess with anybody's kids. Leave kids alone."
"And if the media wants to attack and ridicule every Republican, well that's what they're gonna do," Cruz said. "But leave our kids alone."
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