Imus, Youmus, Wemus–can’t we all just get along-us?

I have resisted the Don Imus brouhaha, not because I don’t have a dog that wants to be in the fight, but because I’ve been vacillating between amusement and disgust at how it’s unfolded.

As it turns out, Imus was rightly cancelled (in both his main gigs), but for the wrong reasons. I’ve read and listened to (yeh, I even watched some fluff heads on TV) as much of the commentary as I could stomach, and the general consensus is that he was “fired” for his racist remarks that were in some way ioffensive to a broad group of people, a whole “race”.

And that’s just plain flat the wrong reason. He ought to have been forced to grovel before the people he had insulted, then “fired”. And by “people he had insulted” I mean the women of the Rutgers basketball team and thenm alone. (Ann Coulter is the only talking head I read who seemed to come close to making sense on this. In fact, she agreed with my comments to my Wonder Woman the other day, almost right on downthe line. :-)) Imus did NOT insult all black women (or even all blacks–I’m not going to call ’em “Afro-Americans because I despise all such hyphenated-American designations. Heck, the number of “Afro-Americans” approaches zero. Most are “Afro-Americans” to the same degree that I’m a “Celtic-American”. Fuggedaboutit.). He insulted a specific group of women who were not a fair target for such. “Public people”–those with egos the size of Texas–make fair targets for all kinds of insults (think darned near any politician *spit*, media celebrity, etc.) The Rutgers women are not in that class and should have been afforded the common decency dur the common man (yeh, and if some sexist woman out there dislikes my generic use of “man” then just bite me).

BTW, I have just one major disagreement with Coulter’s take on the issue, and that’s with her tag line:

Now, if Imus had called the basketball players “fat, race-baiting black men with clownish hairstyles,” well, then perhaps Sharpton would be owed an apology.

Ann’s pooed the scrooch with that sentence. Better would have been,

“Now, if Imus had called Al Sharpton–that race-baiting, lying racist— ‘a nappy-headed ho’ then nappy-headed hos everywhere whould have been owed an apology.”

Of course ALL this Imus flap, especially the argument that he insulted ALL black women– begs the question, “Where’s the outrage over all the trash talk in ‘rap’?” Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Double standard and all that. Just as blacks can say the “N” word with impunity (while anyone else is stripped bare, smeared with honey and staked out on an ant bed, then dragged behind a boat in shark-infested water as chum for doing so), so is it just fine and dandy, hunky dory for black rap “artists” *spit* to heap vile vituperation on the heads of women, because, well, they’re black, right?

That’s what the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind apparently thinks.

(Update: Oh, BTW, I’ve never felt Imus was anything but a bag of noxious hot air, a worthless waste of oxygen. I never understood how anyone could listen to his line of B.S. for more than five minutes, and became convinced that those who did suffered brain damage resulting in an ability to continue to listen to his line. Ditto for Howard Stern and half a ditto for O’Reilly. Am of about the same opinion about Rush Limbaugh as O’Reilly: both arrogant air bags with appeal to some, but blind pigs who do manage to find an acorn now and then, which still makes them better than 99.999% of Mass Media Podpeople.)

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