Hurricane Imus -- A Little Perspective, Please!

People on both sides of the Right/Left divide seem unable to stop babbling about the whole Don Imus thing. And as usual when a brouhaha of this sort blows up, sane and reasonable people are invited to keep quiet. Well, I'm not gonna.

From the Right, there is a minimization of what Imus did, along with a fixation on how "overboard" the Left has gone with this. From the Left, there is hysteria.

Let's not minimize what happened. A sixty-six-year-old man publically called college girls whores. Forget, for just a minute, the respective races of the people involved. If this clown called my daughters whores, I'd be moving furniture to get at him.

Has the whole thing been overblown? Of course it has. But I hear a lot of noise from so-called conservatives about how supposedly harmless it is that a man in late middle age could slander young ladies like that and get away with it. Along with an attempt to subliminally link these young ladies with the "exotic dancer" who falsely accused the Duke lacrosse players of rape.

If you've been guilty of this, then shame on you. I'm ashamed of you, if you lack the sense or decency to be ashamed of yourselves.

Never, ever again do I want to hear these phoney-baloney "conservatives" pine for the good ol' days when civility reigned in public discourse. A sixty-six-year-old fool called college girls whores. Next question?

Now, has the Left overblown it? Whenever Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton jump into anything, you know that's gonna happen. We don't seem to be able to stop it from happening. Perhaps, instead of chattering on about it, endlessly, we should simply point out that Jackson and Sharpton are publicity-mongering opportunists and laugh them off. Point and laugh -- a good strategy for fools who want to be taken seriously but shouldn't.

It is childish to respond to childishness with more of the same. Your kindergarten teacher used to tell you that. Maybe you should have listened to her.

Let me explain what Imus was really doing. He was bagging on womens' basketball. It had nothing to do with race, really. For guys in crisis about their own masculinity, any stick is good enough to beat women athletes with. Most of the Rutgers players happen to be black, so out of his motorized mouth popped some stuff and nonsense about "nappy-headed ho's." Had the players been white, he'd have made fun of their height, the fact that most of them don't look like fashion models, or whatever other lame-ass reason he could glom onto.

Because we have ignored what was really going on, it will continue to happen. Unless those of us who are, in particular, fans of womens' sports begin to stand up and call this crap out, it will continue to happen. The Rutgers basketball team deserves a lot of credit for having fought their way to the NCAA womens' finals. They had to beat a lot of great teams (including my own Arizona State Lady Sun Devils) to get there. And NOBODY can take that away from them.

Imus should not have been fired. Now they've made a martyr out of him. I can't think of very many people who deserve it less.