Commenters rip Post-Dispatch for not mentioning Blunt's monkey joke in speech coverage

Seventh District Congressman Roy Blunt's infamous monkey joke, in which he seemed to refer to President Barack Obama as being the monkey who sets the agenda for Washington has been widely discussed in the blogosphere, but was not included in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's coverage of the speech.

That omission was noted by those leaving comments on the Post-Dispatch website, including this one:

I find it surprising that this article makes no mention of the monkey joke Representative Blunt told at the Values Voter Summit. Not a very thorough story without it, I think.

The author of the article, Bill Lambrecht, explained the decision to leave it out this way:

The story resonated with me some because I’ve been in rural India and encountered more than a few monkeys with time on their hands and mischief on their minds. Blunt’s meaning — the monkey metaphor — seemed to have something to do with disorganization in Congress.
In response to my question, Blunt said he used to use the story in speeches but hadn’t recently.
I thought about putting it in the blog but it was long and didn’t seem to fit. Also, I’m generally averse to writing about politicians’ anecdotes unless there’s a clear reason for doing so.
One of the critics here said I should have just put the story out there and let readers decide for themselves. Decide what? If Blunt had some deep, dark meaning for talking about monkeys? We all know where that one would be headed. With so much silliness coming at people these days on the Web, one of the jobs of journalists is to act as a filter. I’ll keep doing it.
Freud famously said: “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
In this case, my take was that monkeys were just monkeys.

I would gladly accept Lambrecht's explanation, lame as it appears to be, were it not for this section of his article:

He won applause when he took issue with former President Jimmy Carter’s assertion this week that recent criticisms of President Barack Obama have roots in racial intolerance.

“That’s not what this is about. We can’t be intimidated into believing that’s what this is about,” Blunt said.

The fact that Blunt used the joke in the same speech where he made that comment (and Lambrecht left most of that out, as well), makes it legitimate news.