Maybe I’m just a right-wing Christian square, but I’d never even heard of Don Imus before he made an ass of himself by called in the Rutgers women’s basketball team nappy-headed hos.
Whoever the heck he is I wish he wasn’t white and I wish he hadn’t said that. Why? Lots of reasons. Why a grown man, a multi-millionaire by all accounts, feels the need to attack a group of essentially defenseless college students is beyond me. What a man.
More importantly it gives liberal know-it-alls something else to blame on American corporations. “It’s all about the money,” they cry in their most piteous, angst-filled voices. Of course it is. That’s the purpose of corporations. Rather than blaming CBS for airing a legal but profanity-laced program they – and all of us – should be asking why the FCC started allowing this garbage to grace our airwaves. Furthermore, it’s the individuals who choose to listen the jerks like Imus who make sure there are plenty of them to hear. How about a little old-fashioned personal accountability? Turn him off and he’ll go away, I promise.
More important still is that the damn fool gave Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton the opportunity to crawl out from under their respective racist rocks and recite their ridiculous rhetoric of hate. Says recently turned-on Tom DeLay:
The message of the ongoing Imus scandal is simple: Verbal offenses against anyone, other than conservatives or Christians or Jews, will be treated as crimes, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are the judge and jury. Remember Trent Lott’s ill-fated tribute to Sen. Strom Thurmond or Rush Limbaugh’s criticism of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb? This is the political strategy of the Left—unite to destroy.
One more word from the left, this time from the Rev. Dr. DeForest Soaries:
“If Don Imus had called the wife of a CBS executive an ugly whore he’d have been fired.”
Maybe. But if Imus was black and the insults were thrown at white players none of this would be happening.
Or should I say “has happened”? CBS fired Imus this afternoon.
The firing I don’t have a problem with. I do object, however, to doing it because of pressure from black activists demanding special treatment.
Here’s a brain-teaser: If the Duke Lacrosse players accused of raping a black stripper had received this kind of high-powered support from white power brokers, could the power of the resulting liberal shit storm be measured? Or would it have blown away the scale?
Happily an abbreviated form of justice was done in this case yesterday. Abbreviated in that an either corrupt or incompetent District Attorney still has his job pending a hearing before the State Bar association. Abbreviated in that the 88 Duke University professors who publicly lynched the three young men falsely accused in this case have never apologized and probably will never admit that they were wrong. Abbreviated in that these so-called educators continue to hold their jobs despite the fact that their racially and politically motivated actions publicly embarrassed their employer.
In fact, earlier this year one such Duke professor resigned after two of the players were re-admitted to school (the third having already graduated). Karla Holloway said then:
“The decision by the university to readmit the students, especially just before a critical judicial decision on the case, is a clear use of corporate power, and a breach, I think, of ethical citizenship.”
And:
“The public support [the administration] has extended to these students has been absent in regard to faculty who have been under constant and often vicious attack.”
Perhaps, Ms. Holloway, the university refused to pander to you because the facts of the case dictated otherwise. For my money, the breach of ethical citizenship was committed by ex-Professor Holloway when she pre-judged the case in a public forum.
Reputations, sadly, can never be fully repaired once sullied, even when the accusers and their accusations are both proven false.
I wish these three young men the best of luck. I’d recommend them to my own alma mater if North Carolina wasn’t so far away from Texas. Then again, perhaps that’s what the two who remain undergraduates have in mind.
Personally I hope that they will re-enroll at Duke University and finish their education there in such a manner that proves their superiority to the petty, mean-spirited jackals who used a woman’s false accusation as an opportunity to promote their own misguided agendas.
Don Imus won’t have a chance to redeem himself at CBS; frankly I don’t think he deserves one. But the Duke boys do and I pray they make the most of it.
So what’s the point of all this? There’s a double-standard in this country that favors social groups that liberals champion. Justice, economic, criminal, and otherwise, is increasingly hard to find for people who happen to be part of the wrong demographic. This is another reason why I believe that American liberalism has lost its way and rather badly at that.
What ever happened to the idea that truth and justice were the American way?
It’s important that we re-establish this principle. One way to do that is to cry foul whenever injustices are done. Another is to not perpetrate them ourselves.
(Hat tips to the Texas Rainmaker and Sister Toldjah)
Update
Read Debbie Schlussel’s take on the difference between black and white “comedians” and you’ll understand what I was saying earlier this week about free speech being dependent on the speaker’s color.
I don’t quite buy the example Debbie gives but there are plenty of other examples out there, particularly in the black music biz.
I happened to download a Missy Elliot MP3 a few years back in which the theme of her song was that she was a crack whore who’d do anything for whichever guy was the most vicious gang banger. Nice.
This sort of “artist” – and Elliot’s by no means the worst of them – is a disgrace to America. Yes, their “speech” is protected but that doesn’t mean their trash should have been put on wax in the first place.
Michael Grant, to whom I linked above, says that corporations should have been the target of Imus’ detractors. But where is the outrage over black rappers who advocate killing cops and whites in their music? Clearly we should put economic pressure on record companies to convince them to drop racist, degrading acts, right?
No. As Ms. Schlussel says, whites aren’t entitled to protection from minority racism or to hold opinions about the subject. Only Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are entitled to discuss the issue of race because they are so knowledgeable, open-minded, and even-handed, or so they say.
I don’t think that race can ever be discussed openly so long as these relics from the past continue to have the influence they possess today. If I were optimistic I would say that all it would take for them to lose that power is for the media to report on what these gentlemen actually say, do, and believe. Surely the white liberals who sponsor Sharpton’s hate speech would run screaming when they realize what he really stands for, wouldn’t they?
Sadly, I’m not that optimistic. Democrats – all politicians, true, but particularly the Dems – are more interested in getting re-elected than doing what’s right for America, even if that means bowing and scraping at Jesse Jackson’s feet for the right to buy “his people’s” votes.
Sigh. It’s discouraging, but all one can do is keep trying to move the pile in the right direction.
With regard to race, the right thing is for all Americans to stop being so obsessed by it. It’s natural and right that we prefer the company of those who look like us. There’s no point in pretending otherwise or that it’s wrong.
It is, however, unhealthy and untrue to believe that one’s own kind are inherently better than another race or creed.
It’s the impact we have on the lives of others that determines our worth, not how much money we make or what color are skin is. That’s a lesson that all of us could stand to re-learn, the all-too-common race and religious haters most of all.