"Don who?"
Posted on 04/12/2007 10:33:35 PM PDT by jdm
Are we really a better country because, after he was publicly whipped for 10 days as the worst kind of racist, with whom no decent person could associate, he was thrown off the air?Cards on the table.
This writer works for MSNBC, has been on the Imus show scores of times, watches Imus every morning, and likes the show, the music and the guys: the I-Man, Bernie, Charles and Tom Bowman.
And Imus is among the best interviewers in our business. Not only does he read and follow the news closely, he listens and probes as well as any interviewer in America. Because he is a comic, people mistake how good a questioner he is.
Is "Imus in the Morning" outrageous? Over the top at times? Are things said every week, if not every day, where you say, "He's going too far"? Yeah. But outrageousness is part of the show, whether the skits are of "Teddy Kennedy," "Reverend Falwell," "Mayor Nagin" or "The Cardinal."
And when Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "tattooed ... nappy-headed ho's," he went over the top. The women deserved an apology. There was no cause, no call to use those terms. As Ann Coulter said, they were not fair game.
But Imus did apologize, again and again and again.
And lest we forget, these are athletes in their prime, the same age as young women in Iraq. They are not 5-year-old girls, and they are capable of brushing off an ignorant comment by a talk-show host who does not know them, or anything about them.
Who, after all, believed the slur was true? No one.
Compare, if you will, what was done to them – a single nasty insult – to the savage slanders for weeks on end of the Duke lacrosse team and the three players accused by a lying stripper of having gang-raped her at a frat party.
Duke faculty and talking heads took that occasion to vent their venom toward all white "jocks" on college campuses. Where are the demands for apologies from the talk-show hosts, guests, Duke faculty members and smear artists, all of whom bought into the lies about those Duke kids – because the lies comported with their hateful view of America?
And hate is what this is all about.
While the remarks of Imus and Bernie about the Rutgers women were indefensible, they were more unthinking and stupid than vicious and malicious. But malice is the right word to describe the howls for their show to be canceled and them to be driven from the airwaves – by phonies who endlessly prattle about the First Amendment.
The hypocrisy here was too thick to cut with a chainsaw.
What was the term the I-Man used? It was "ho's," slang for whores, a term employed ad infinitum et ad nauseam by rap and hip-hop "artists." It is a term out of the African-American community. Yet, if any of a hundred rap singers has lost his contract or been driven from the airwaves for using it, maybe someone can tell me about it.
If the word "ho's" is a filthy insult to decent black women, and it is, why are hip-hop artists and rap singers who use it incessantly not pariahs in the black community? Why would black politicians hobnob with them? Why are there no boycotts of the advertisers of the radio stations that play their degrading music?
Answer: The issue here is not the word Imus used. The issue is who Imus is – a white man, who used a term about black women only black folks are permitted to use with impunity and immunity.
Whatever Imus' sins, no one deserves to have Al Sharpton – hero of the Tawana Brawley hoax, resolute defender of the fake rape charge against half a dozen innocent guys, which ruined lives – sit in moral judgment upon them.
"It is our feeling that this is only the beginning. We must have a broad discussion on what is permitted and not permitted in terms of the airwaves," says Sharpton. It says something about America that someone with Al's track record can claim the role of national censor.
Who is next? And why do we take it?
I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person, says Imus. Indeed, whoever used his microphone to do more good for more people – be they the cancer kids of Imus Ranch, the families of Iraq war dead now more justly compensated because of the I-Man or the cause of a cure for autism?
"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality," said Lord Macaulay. Unfortunately, Macauley never saw the likes of the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.
Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion – and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.
Yep :)
"Them" refers to rap artists.
“Justice was done.”
How so? I am the most UN-RACIST person on this earth, and I think it was funny...
“Imus was fired by public opinion. Justice was done.”
Bunk. Imus was fired by liberal corporate cowards who worry more about offending human excrement like Sharpton than about fairness. Imus’ indecency never caught up with him before.
This is one of the best Buchanan columns I’ve ever seen, and it’s one of the best attacks on the “civil rights” mania that I’ve ever seen.
The outrageous lynching of Imus may well be the opening shot in a major battle against the free speech of all conservative, libertarian, and non-PC media figures.
If we’re to remain a free society, sometimes we have to defend people we dislike.
Victim mentality and political correctness have become the social norms in America. Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling.
I don’t...
“I don’t...”
So many people do... I sure wish he were the president instead of GWB.
Pat Buchanan is hated by the people who have a stake in another kind of victimhood.
Here's something I posted a few days ago anticipating what Pat Buchanan said in this article:
Don Imus has compounded his original gaucherie with this mawkish groveling at the clay feet of this hypocritical buffoon, the Reverend Al Sharpton. Normally one would pass this off without a second thought as a kind of pathetic justice visited on a man who himself had slandered white people and Christians as a way of making money for so long. But this groveling to Sharpton certainly demands a second thought
Don Imus, intent on preserving his career ( not for the money, God knows he is wealthy enough, but for the status and leverage it gives him,) has elevated this "Reverend" to the status of a Pope who can dispense absolution for the modern mortal sin of racism. In prosaic language: Don Imus has validated Sharpton as a censor. The implications of this is are ominous for me and for you. It means that Sharpton, in effect, can decide what you and I may hear and ultimately what we might say. I never voted for the Reverend Al Sharpton into any office except buffoon of the week or perhaps hypocrite of the year. Anyway, there is no national federal office of censor. What has happened here legitimates race baiting and in my world race baiting is a far more serious threat than mere gaucherie.
You say I exaggerate, you say I overstate the case. Consider these thoughts from one of my recent posts:
Imus is an equal opportunity traducer. He routinely features a character actor/comedian who satirizes Reverend Falwell. As a Protestant Christian I am offended by this. His producer routinely presents a satire making Cardinal Egan look ridiculous. Catholic Christians equally have a right to be offended. But in neither instance is NBC or CBS offended. They husband their indignation only to react to vilification of female African-American basketball players.
Who was the reactor in chief? That charlatan, the Reverend Al Sharpton! I find Reverend Al's very existence offensive and I certainly find his mendacious behavior in the Tawana Brawley caper to be a vilification of white people. The powers that control the airwaves, private profit making companies, have not reacted in indignation against the buffoonery and malicious anti-white vilifications of Reverend Al, rather they have actually given him his own radio program.
Do I care? Personally, no. After all, I hold Reverend Al in such contempt that it is impossible for him to insult me, impossible for him to get under my skin. Likewise, the contrived slanders against Reverend Falwell or other Christians committed routinely on Don Imus' program fail to arouse me, perhaps because I'm of an age and upbringing which considers these sorts of things to be part of the chaff of our modern world. But on a political and policy level, I care very deeply because the Reverend Al Sharpton, and his fellow travelers at CBS and NBC, are setting a standard which ultimately will shift political power away from me and to the likes of the Reverend Al Sharpton. And that is a prospect that arouses me fully.
Political correctness, multiculturalism, laws against hate crimes, and other legal, quasi legal, and extralegal restrictions on freedom of thought and freedom of expression are not the natural and haphazard expressions of a leftist political philosophy, rather they are a calculated attempt to move the fulcrum of political power to the left by changing the rules under which we live. As a white, male, Christian, I don't have the same standing to complain as a black buffoon and notorious liar. As a white, male animal, I have been defined into an animal who has fewer rights than other animals who are "more equal."
A few years ago we had no notion of hate crimes now the selective prosecution of them has become a weapon to be feared by a group currently approaching minority status in America: white males. When not labeled a hate crime, selective prosecution can nevertheless be an outrage, witness the recent outrages against the Duke Lacrosse team. The actions to suspend Don Imus, evidently taken in concert by two competitors, CBS and NBC, were the acts of private, that is nongovernmental, entities but they enjoy a government granted franchise and they operate under a license which renders them in a very real sense quasi governmental or at least quasi public entities. What they do here sets precedent.
I do not want the precedent set that says that Al Sharpton can control what I hear or see or say.
Amen! They're acting like victims instead of champions. Apparently, they never heard the saying about sticks and stones breaking bones but words never hurting.
On one of the cable news scrolls tonight, I saw a blurb that said Hillary Rodham would be speaking at Rutgers (Monday, I think). If that's true, she can give them lots of seasoned advice on how to play the victim card over and over again to get ahead in life.
She’s going to congratulate them on their victim performance and try to cement it into their heads. Along with anyone else who is listening of course. It is really sad that their coach led them into this and demonstrated the technique so well. Maybe that’s why they lost to Tennessee.
This masterpiece by Pat Buchanan is the best written news commentary I’ve read in a long time. I started to cut and paste some of the best lines, but then I realized the whole article deserved to be cut-and-pasted and showed off for its brilliance. Buchanan makes one excellent point after another, all of which will be dismissed by the MSM as the words of one of Imus’ fellow racists. With everything that’s in the news today, I feel as if America is about to implode. Buchanan is one of the last voices of reason.
The fact that his ratings have been sliding for years made him expendable.
Pat was lynched long ago...it started in ‘96...the elites rule both parties...it’s sad but i have come to accept it now.
Maybe, but apparently they took a financial hit anyway by canceling Imus.
The primary motivation here was ideological. Another motivation was to curry favor with the Rat machine in a more direct way, by removing an enemy of Hillary. Another was not wanting to be called names by professional character assassins. And yet another was to avoid a boycott.
I saw that coach on with Olbermann the other night while channel-surfing. Oh, they were quite chummy - go figure! And what about all the bleeding hearts out there who have become overnight race pundits on the cable networks? Hey - have you heard? - we're supposed to have a dialogue about race in this country. We're supposed to heal. We're supposed to dig down deep into our souls and examine ourselves. What a load of crap. If it was about all that, Imus would be recognized as someone who has done far more good than bad in his life, and he'd be back at the charity radiothon microphone tomorrow morning.
Sharpton, Jackson and the N.O.W. gang don't want a dialogue about race issues or gender issues. They only want REVENGE... sweet REVENGE. Imus is only the opening act.
If he had the same number of listeners and stations as he did 8 years ago, CBS and MSNBC would have found a way to keep him on the air.
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