As Curtis Houck at NewsBusters reported this evening, the Washington Post published "a disgusting GIF early Tuesday evening depicting (Ted) Cruz’s young daughters as toy monkeys being played with" accompanied by a pathetic two-paragraph justification by cartoonist Ann Telnaes as to why Cruz's daughters "were fair game."

The Post withdrew the cartoon and the justification within a few hours, but not before the leftists at the Politico played their mean-spirited, agenda-driven hand, going into predictable passive-aggressive "Republicans/conservatives attack" mode while making it appear as if Cruz was making much ado about nothing:

The New York Post's Seth Mandel saw the Politico story as it was originally written, and indicated that there was no headlined or in-story reference to how Cruz's daughters were depicted (links to his original tweets are here, here and here):

Politico revised the story's headline a short time later (the only way to determine this was through a search at its web site), and then replaced it with a completely new story by Eliza Collins once the Washington Post decided to pull the cartoon.

As to Cruz "lashing out," horse manure. He played defense — and took offense — brilliantly (HT Twitchy):

As for Politico, though the web site tried to cover its tracks after the fact, we now know that they've exposed themselves as a willing and even eager accomplice in the enterprise the New York Post's Mandel described in this tweet, and that its credibility has descended into depths one wouldn't have thought possible:

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.