I can’t stand Don Imus. He’s in the pantheon of talk radio personalities who are either so bigoted (Michael Savage) or so stupid (Lars Larson) that I can’t stomach the idiocy which he spews.
So when he called the Rutgers Women’s basketball team a bunch of nappy-headed hos last week, I wasn’t exactly tuned in, nodding to myself, saying, “You tell’em, Don.”
But I will say this: Don Imus has a right to say his stupid bit if he wants to, including ignorant comments like the one he made. The general public, who by and large ignore him like I do, have a right not to listen. They also have a right to boycott his advertisers (and to my mind, probably should have been long before this).
The idea, however, that saying something stupid or hurtful in some way disqualifies him from speaking publicly is absurd at best and dangerous at worse. Here’s the absurd part, quoted from a WNBC story Rutgers Players to Meet with Imus:
The Rutgers women’s basketball coach and several of her players expressed pain and outrage at the racially charged comments Don Imus made about them, saying he overshadowed their success with remarks that degraded women across the globe.
Pain and outrage? Overshadowed your success? Degraded women across the globe? Are you kidding me? You’d think he’d killed somebody’s grandmother at halftime of the championship game. Honestly, if this is your reaction to some two-bit radio host’s idiotic commment, what’s your reaction going to be when something really important happens?
So read the story and see where the politics of victimization of brought us. Something that could and should have been dismissed with “wow, what an idiot” is a leading news story (along with, ugh, Anne Nicole Smith’s baby’s DNA test) while important events (Iraq, global warming, etc.) are pushed to the background.