Posted: May 8th, 2007, 3:56 pm
LOL!! 
Nope.mtmynd wrote:Hi Jimbo -
you said: "i watched don imus plenty... "
Deb said: ""Anybody who listened to the Imus show, and enjoyed it, were probably bigoted"
Conclusion? You're probably a bigot along with everyone of his guests and his millions of listeners. Welcome to the club. bub!
Jimboloco wrote that he'd listened and then turn him off because he was put off by his "stick" (deb, paraphrasing. Jimboloco I hope that's more or less accurate.)
Everyone I know, and work with as well, turned him off, or as you said, never bothered to turn him on in the first place because his 'stick' didn't appeal to us; because his jokes/joking were racist, bigoted, and misogynistic ~ none of which was funny (to any of us).
I agree with Stan Simpson
Greater Good In Imus Exit
May 5, 2007
Good things have indeed been happening since this has happened. IMO, necessary things."One of the realities of Imus and his entertaining and often insulting humor is that he made some folks comfortable with their own bigotry."
<and>
"Although his degradation of the young women will be a blot on his epitaph, the I-Man can also take credit for the long-overdue introspection and self-cleansing these days in the media and entertainment industries.
Recent moves across the country speak to an emerging awareness about the need for standards in regulating offensive on-air language. And the dearth of diverse voices in leadership"
I enjoyed reading this commentary from the New Yorker, the last paragraph most of all. It speaks to the greater good that is happening from this Imus situation.
Excerpt from:
Imus Versus Imus
by Nick Paumgarten
One bracket that didn’t make it into the book [“The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything.”] was Good Imus, Evil Imus. Sandomir had drawn that one up in the hope of tempting Don Imus, the talk-radio host and effective promoter of books, to plug “The Enlightened Bracketologist” on his program. In the end, Reiter and Sandomir, loath to pander, decided to leave it out. But last week, in the midst of a controversy over the most extreme—or certainly most consequential—manifestation to date of Evil Imus, a copy of this bracketological outtake found its way here, and provided a useful prism through which to regard the spectacle of Imus’s immolation.
Over the years, Imus and, especially, his sidekicks regularly trafficked in minstrelsy, anti-gay patter, and ethnic stereotyping, of degrees ranging from the mild to the execrable. He or his minions have compared Patrick Ewing to an ape, said that pictures of Venus and Serena Williams belong in National Geographic rather than in Playboy, and are reported to have said of Gwen Ifill, then a Times reporter, “Isn’t the Times wonderful? It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.” More broadly, they have regularly deployed an array of slurs (Jewboy, towelhead) and a cast of crude voice caricatures (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as José Jiménez, Cardinal Egan as an Irish bigot) that, at best, skirted the line. But finally, two weeks ago, Imus crossed it, or at least got called out for doing so. In a discussion of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, after its appearance in the N.C.A.A. finals, Imus remarked that the players, most of them black, were “rough girls.” “Some hard-core ho’s,” his sidekick and producer (and designated line-crosser) Bernard McGuirk replied. Imus added, inexcusably, “That’s some nappy-headed ho’s there.”
Media Matters for America, a watchdog group, put the offending clip and transcript on its Web site, and in the next couple of days a fury took hold. Imus, initially dismissive, hit the apology circuit, but his grovelling, which managed to seem both grudging and sincere, failed to keep his advertisers and regular guests from abandoning him. (Snoop Dogg, carefully parsing the application of “ho,” distanced himself and his rapper peers from the I-man. “We are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls,” he told MTV News. “We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things.”) The outrage, and the punishments designed to offset it, metastasized, and by Thursday Imus had lost his show. “You people,” as Imus regrettably referred to his tormentors, during a punitive appearance on Al Sharpton’s radio show, had won. Governor Jon Corzine, of New Jersey, volunteered to preside over a session between Imus and the Rutgers team at the Governor’s Mansion, but on the way he was severely injured in a car crash. The summit went on.
“Imus in the Morning” thrived on a high-low diet. Between the wisecrack-speckled news reports and the coarse comedy bits, the show featured interviews with prominent politicians and journalists (including some from this magazine), who were expected to pay their respects not only to the I-man but also to his brother Fred, the program’s self-styled redneck-at-large. In return, guests got publicity for their campaigns or their books, and an opportunity to reveal, to a presumably more sympathetic audience, their irreverent sides—they could be more wry than they generally appeared. Imus either indulged or tolerated them, depending on his mood, but their participation brought him influence and respect. This derived from the airtime, and the threat of haranguing, rather than from any political or ideological inclination. The I-man is not an idea man; although he let his guests veer into politics and policy—an occasional hazard of conversing with politicians—what he really seemed interested in was whether they were talking straight or were being “weasels” or talking “jive.” He’s a curmudgeon, most of all. And, once the guests were gone, Imus and his cohorts could get back to goofing off, and the politicians could pretend to be oblivious. It was a perilous balancing act, but the two Imuses, like John Edwards’s two Americas, managed to coexist.
In the Good Imus, Evil Imus bracketological experiment, the good Imus, represented in the draw by a New Mexico ranch he runs for children with cancer, prevails. On the way to the final, the ranch vanquished Imus’s stint in rehab (for cocaine abuse), his marriage (to Deirdre, who converted him to vegetarianism), his calling Bill Clinton “a pot-smoking weasel,” and then, in the Final Four, his previously undefeated Clinton modifier—“fat pantload.” In the championship, the ranch beat out the best (in this draw) of the bad: Imus’s notorious appearance, in 1996, at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association banquet, where he lampooned the infidelities of Bill Clinton, while the President sat beside him on the dais, fuming. Imus’s Rutgers smear, if it had suited up, would have creamed them all.
What will come of all this? Perhaps one could set up a new bracketological draw, with all the post-Imus implications and discussion topics bidding, like so many Gonzagas and Florida States, for primacy in the league of cultural consequence. Free-speech martyrdom, hate-speech curtailment, black pride, black blame, white guilt, the end of the shock jock, the rise of satellite radio, the imperialism of advertisers, the intolerance of intolerance, the defilement of the public airwaves: you had better begin filling out your brackets, because the tournament is well under way.
