Silent scream. The Boston Globe today didn't run The Boondocks. It didn't replace it with another cartoon, either -- just a lame quote of the day or some such thing. And yes, today's Boondocks is a pointed antiwar cartoon, expessing "outrage and disappointment at the situation in the Middle East." Click here to see it. And here's an AP story on some of the controversies that Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder has found himself in since 9/11.

No such controversy over the stupid right-wing comic strip Mallard Fillmore, which the Globe runs every day without protest (except the occasional letter to the editor) and, I'm sure, without readers. Here's a nice one from March 3 (select date when you get there), which refers to "the ungrateful, hypocritical Franch pansies who call themselves our 'allies.'"

Thinking I might have missed some quantum leap in linguistic evolution, I decided to look up pansy in the American Heritage Dictionary, which defines it as "a disparaging term for a man or boy who is considered effeminate" or "a disparaging term for a homosexual man." Yup, it still means what it did in the seventh grade.

So did the dog eat today's Boondocks or did the Globe chicken out? An explanation awaits. (Thanks to AQ for pointing this one out.)