while Espinosa's comment was not. There really should not be a comparison here.

You have to look to history to understand the Elephant and Donkey mottos. The Donkey was originally used by Jackson's opponent's to try to label him as a "jackass" for his populist positions. He turned the tables and said "fine" and embraced it as an ass-kicking symbol of "letting the people rule", and of course Jackson won. It was much later institutionalized when artist Thomas Nast started using it in publications to symbolize the Dem Party. It was Nast who also started the tradition of the Elephant when he used it in a drawing to show the R's as just one of the animals that the Dems were getting ready to scare the shit out of at a zoo in 1874 when they SMASHED the R's due to economic woes and Grant's corruption scandals. So in both cases, the ass-kicking Donkeys kicked ass, and the big pig slow-moving elephants who like Kennedy said just hold each other's tails and follow each other around blindly and numbly were and ARE the "LOSERS"!

PS: Nast also is properly credited with our current depiction of Santa Claus given his artistic renderings of that character in the 1800's.

Bill Maher's comment was a comic riff on the "The Planet of the Apes" movies, and in NO WAY a racial reference...