I posted the following article on Sunday via my remote posting setup. I didn’t realize until last night that the article didn’t go up on the site on Sunday. I almost skipped it, but since everyone seems to be talking about Imus more now than when I posted, I figured I could still get away with it. Following is the original post I made Sunday afternoon, unedited. I put it here just so I can look in a week or two and see if Al Sharpton is still expressing his outrage or not. Then I can point back and say “See, I told you so.” or “Guess I was wrong” when we know what he’ll do.
As a long time non-fan of Don Imus, the fact that he said something asinine on the radio is no surprise. I am, however, surprised to hear that Imus made yet another idiotic statement on air sufficiently offensive that critics are calling for his resignation (um, again, that is).
Imus: So, I watched the basketball game last night between – a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women’s final.
Rosenberg: Yeah, Tennessee won last night – seventh championship for [Tennessee coach] Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.
Imus: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and –
McGuirk: Some hard-core hos.
Imus: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some – woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like – kinda like – I don’t know.
McGuirk: A Spike Lee thing.
Imus: Yeah.
McGuirk: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes – that movie that he had.
Yes, you read that right. Imus called the mostly black Rutgers women’s basketball team some nappy-headed hos on air. Then McGuirk fans the flames with ‘The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes.’ Now Imus has been on the radio for, what, almost 40 years? And he’s been a prick on the radio for, oh, somewhere nearing all of that time. Thing is, there’s a great demand in America for offensive jack-asses to broadcast idiocy on air so that all the weak-minded folks in the country can get their regular dosage of intolerance, misinformation, or stupidity (in Imus’ case, I think they get all three) and their guidance on what outrage to gripe about at any given time. Thus we have Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Coast to Coast AM, and so on.
According to the Fox story, Rev. Al Sharpton continues his media-whoring ways, promising “…to picket Imus’ New York radio home, WFAN-AM, unless the veteran of nearly 40 years of anything-goes broadcasting is gone within a week.” Come back next week, and we’ll review the state of Sharpton’s picketing. Hopefully it will make it on CNN or some similar television news station so we can see next week how ol’ Al is holding up. Or, we can see that this story has already faded and Sharpton is looking for the next big story that will allow him to get his name in the media.
[tags]Imus makes (another) offensive remark – critics outraged[/tags]