Today’s Obligatory Imus Post

I suppose I must weigh in on this subject partly because I mentioned it a minute ago in my comments about Gov. Corzine’s terrible road accident, but I long for this story to fade from public view, actually (along with Imus himself, I hope, but I’m not holding my breath).

Possibly the busiest freeper pundit out there as nearly as I can guess is Kathleen Parker of The Orlando Sentinel, who, after writing this hard-hitting, Murrow-esque account of a YouTube video showing John Edwards fussing with his hair (please), followed it up with another mea culpa on behalf of Imus, most notably this…

Black hip-hop artists have been denigrating the women of their families and neighborhoods for years with terminology that reduces all women to receptacles for men's pleasure. Sharpton and Jackson would do well to direct some of their outrage to that neck of the woods.

Meanwhile, the broader savaging of Imus seems disproportionate to the crime. There is in the air the unmistakable scent of schadenfreude -- pleasure in someone else's misery -- as some in the media have turned on the radio jock like pack wolves on a wounded puppy.

Otherwise, his takedown feels like hecklers gone wild. When the star is down, the heckler gets to be the star. Celebrity comes to the one with the loudest voice, the meanest jibe or, in this case, the pithiest piety.

And of course, not to be outdone, Cal Thomas inflicted readers of the Bucks County Courier Times with similar apologia today (my wife, bless her, made the mistake of actually reading this cretin, and that’s how I know; I gave up on him years ago myself...and it also never ceases to make me laugh when I read a columnist decry people’s preoccupation with stories like this or the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby when those same people dive into the muck over it just like anyone else.).

Yeah, I’m sure that, considering the Edwards column, Parker knows all about mean jibes, and saying that Imus’ words don’t constitute hate speech is hardly the point (and believe it or not, she wrote something else that deserves a response that I’ll try to get to today).

I’m sure most of us understand what I’m about to say, but it deserves emphasis (again, pointed out by my wife this morning).

Some of the quotes from Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”) and Al Sharpton (“White interloper” – this is an insult? Hey, I grew up in Philadelphia; you’ll have to do better than that!) that have been used to somehow validate Imus’ horrible words fall laughingly short by comparison. While Jackson’s phrase was stupid, it was a broad denunciation of a group of people designated by their religion in a broad geographic area.

Imus, on the other hand, singled out a particular group of women playing a particular sport for a particular college university. In addition to being horribly racist and insensitive, Imus’ conduct is legally actionable – the women could file a lawsuit against him for slander, and I hope they do, actually.

And here is another important difference; people have lumped media personalities such as Howard Stern into this mess by decrying “the coarsening of our culture.” I don’t like that either, but as far as I’m concerned, it is up to us individually to decide what is proper by choosing not to view or listen to something when we find it objectionable. Besides, the people who appear on Stern’s show or most other programs are there to promote something and know that they’re setting themselves up to a degree; almost everything that is said under that pretext is fair comment. On the other hand, the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team sought absolutely nothing from Don Imus.

Some of the freeper apologia on behalf of Imus reminds me of the time Suzanne Fields blamed “patronizing white liberal guilt” for the outcry over the words of Trent “All These Problems” Lott, which was no less wrong then as it is now.

Finally, here is some thoughtful information on this from Media Matters, and I think Digby also puts everything into perspective very well here (hat tips to Atrios for both).