Ted Cruz Fundraising Off Washington Post Cartoon Depicting Daughters As Monkeys (VIDEO, TWEETS)

Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has launched an "emergency" fundraising campaign with the goal of pulling in $1 million in 24 hours as a response to a Washington Post editorial cartoon that depicts his two daughters as dancing monkeys, calling the drawing a "tasteless attack" on his children.

"My daughters are not FAIR GAME," Cruz wrote in a fundraising email sent late Tuesday, reported NBC News. "I'm sickened ... I knew I'd be facing attacks from day one of my campaign, but I never expected anything like this."

Cruz also took to Twitter to express his outrage.

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at The Washington Post, drew a cartoon of the Texas senator in a Santa outfit with two monkey-like characters meant to represent his daughters, after the family appeared in a parody television advertisement that aired during Saturday Night Live over the weekend, according to CNN.

Telnaes defended her position, according to The Washington Post, saying that "there is an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician's children are off-limits.... But when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father's dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game."

Internally, however, not everybody at the Post was comfortable with the cartoon being published. Ultimately, the cartoon was removed.

Fred Hiatt, the head of Post's editorial page, concluded that the cartoon should be pulled. "It's generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it," Hiatt said in a statement, The Washington Post reported. "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."

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Ted Cruz, 2016 presidential election, Republican Party, Media