Facets

Don Imus -- dirtbag, asshole, racist, misogynist, you name it. Read this.

Not defending his remarks on the radio. There's a threshhold on what you can get away with, and he went past it. It's a fluid sort of thing -- Coulter, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Savage, Beck have all said as bad and worse, depending on your point of view. Michael Moore has played fast and loose with the facts in his films, although his agenda isn't really comparable. (He's a gadfly; the others are hate-mongers. Come to think of it, they don't have much use for facts, either. What's really interesting is that I had to think a minute to come up with a left-winger who can count as a comparable, and he's not, really.*) (Oops -- just to demonstrate that Andy Warhol was right, I had to look up Howard Stern's name. I guess his fifteen minutes is up.) They all have the backing and the audiences, and their victims don't necessarily have the clout. That's why they're still in business (although Savage'a TV show was cancelled pretty damned fast).

The bottom line being Imus has a right to say whatever he wants to say. And his sponsors and the stations he works for have a right not to subsidize it.

Other bottom line: it's not a black-and-white universe.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan, who sometimes reminds us of things without necessarily meaning to.)

Update:

More from Sullivan.

It's a knotty question. No, people are not willing to give rappers and hip-hop artists a pass on their misogyny and homophobia, which is the trope that always gets thrown into the mix whenever anyone takes after any of these goons. Think about the ones who have had concerts and even tours cancelled. To those who complain that whites, for example, will not take on black comedians and singers who display this behavior, I'm not going to say "It's your problem," but I will say "You have to take the lead." It's not something I'm in the middle of and it's not something I can claim to understand completely, so it's not my issue in the sense that I can address it effectively. It's my issue in that it drags everyone down.

Whether some expressions of bigotry are more tolerable than others, I have no answer to that. It's too contextual to draw large conclusions.


* If anyone knows of a left-wing commentator who regularly engages in the minority-bashing that comes out of the likes of those I mentioned, let me know. Please don't hold up some anonymous commenter from DailyKos or HuffPo -- those could just as easily be ringers out to stir up some shit. They don't count. I want a major liberal/progressive blogger or pundit with a following who stereotypes minorities (and as of last November, you can count Republicans as a minority) and uses every unacceptable name in the book to refer to them.