Imus Tell You

As an Imus listener (enabler) I have several thoughts regarding the comments he made about the Rutgers girls basketball team. I agree with nearly everyone that his comments were unacceptable, hurtful, and crass. Not only was this comment made with archaic thinking about black athletes by a throwback to "Jim Crow" days of tolerated segregation, it was also completely uninformed about today's NCAA players and in particular the exceptionally accomplished stature of the Rutgers’s female athletes.

My problem with the firing of Imus is simply that there are so many others more deserving of this fate. In the case of CBS and its parent Viacom, they have a veritable stable of acerbic fanatics willing to employ all manner of obnoxious commentary and envelope-pushing diatribes to attain Limbaughesque notoriety.

It's my belief that Imus' fate was preordained and would have ultimately resulted in his dismissal whether he had made this comment or not. Any off color comment of significant consequence to allow sponsors to claim righteous indignation and juicy enough to be used as bait to set off a media feeding frenzy would have sufficed

The sin Imus was punished for had already been committed when he uttered his own obituary in the form of a racial slur against these young women. Imus was guilty of taking on the Bush administration in a particularly embarrassing way. He had challenged the alibis of all politicians who claimed ignorance about the conditions witnessed at Walter Reed Army Hospital and the abhorrent level of care received by our veterans.

It was necessary to get Imus off the air because he had promised to use his personal bully pulpit to hold those in charge responsible for the substandard care received by our wounded vets this administration has proven to support in word only.