It appears we were BOTH right. Imus is gone.

Gee...I wonder who the right wing will go after first in retaliation? Hmmm...I'm betting Rosie O'Donnel. But maybe not. Perhaps since Ward Churchill was finally fired from his tenured sinecure in academia after years of right-wing agitation, Noam Chomsky will be next on the hit list. Won't that be nice?

Or maybe Bill Maher - who claims to be a libertarian but sure sounds like a flaming leftist - will get the axe. Who knows? It doesn't matter who goes next, because the precedent has been set. And unlike legal precedents, this one can't be challenged in court.

Incidentally, to those of you like me who may despise Don Imus's program but believe he has been censored, and would like to do something about it, please go to:

http://wwwpolychom.blogspot.com

There you will find - at least after a few minutes - a blog post outlining my plans to launch a national protest and boycott of CBS and its parent company. Stay tuned; this ain't over yet.

Corporations can't put you in jail. That's it.

But what they can do in this dog-eat-dog, capitalist society of our's is rob you of your ability to make a living. As the previous poster pointed out, you are ignoring the reality of the socio-economic system in which we live.

From this day forward Don Imus will be positively radioactive to EVERY SINGLE BROADCASTER in America. NO ONE is going to want to touch him with a ten foot pole, lest they be accused of "supporting" Imus's "comments" and thus have their sponsors disappear. I don't think Imus will ever work in broadcasting again, and broadcasting is just about the only thing he knows how to do.

So his career is over. If he were thirty years younger I might conceed that he can rebuild. But not at his age (the man is 65, after all). The punishment, my dear lady, does not fit the crime.

It'll be interesting to see what happens the next time Chris Rock calls a white person a "cracker" on the Letterman show.

You helped to destroy his career and, possibly, his life, and now it's on to more important things, just like that?

Fuck you, Joan. Fuck you straight to hell. And I say that as a progressive-leftist Chomskyite. The man was run out on a rail over next-to-nothing, his implicit freedom of speech violated like almost no one's has been before. And it all came down to threats that Leslie Moonves - unlike William Paley before him - was too much a corporate chickenshit to stand up to. Al Sharpton says jump and corporate America asks "How high?!" It's despicable.

I know this will be deleted in minutes if not seconds. I don't care, because I know you'll see it.

Joe Smith is right, and your knee-jerk reactionary bullshit is getting tiresome, to put it mildly. Where WAS Joan when Emerson was calling for internment? Did she feel then that he should have been fired from HIS radio job? I lived in San Francisco in those days, and I remember Emerson and Saunders all too well.

So YOU stick it.

It's called the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, it's pretty rare when history gives you two stark, contradictory examples that demonstrate how the system works. But here we have two: One from the 1950s and another, literally, from earlier this afternoon.

Two years ago the movie "Good Night and Good Luck" received a great deal of attention. It dramatized Edward R. Murrow's televised confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy, an incident that some historians believe was a cultural turning point in the defeat of McCarthyism, if not McCarthy himself. What the movie only limns is the enormous risk taken by William Paley, then President of CBS. Immediately after the broadcast there were many in America who were calling for Murrow's job, if not his head. Paley held firm in his support. But of course, that was "good" speech.

Today Leslie Moonves was faced with a similar challenge. Threatened by Al Sharpton with boycotts and protests, and seeing some sponsors duck and cover, Moonves could have stood by the principle that however abhorrent Don Imus's comments may have been, he had the right to make them in the context of an entertainment show on the radio. But he did not. He folded like the cheapest of cheap suits. The irony that he is the current President of CBS and therefore an heir of Paley is almost staggering in its implications. Moreover, Moonves failed the test implicit in the First Amendment, that if we believe in freedom of speech it is precisely that speech we most despise that should be defended with the greatest rigor. But hey, Moonves had investors to please, right Emily?

If Moonves has any shame at all, he'll have to remove every mirror in his home and office.

...Chomsky may not curse, but he's lost his cool more than once. Watch the documentary "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media", in particular his tete a tete with John Silber. Like him, I'm no bloodless intellectual. I have passionate beliefs, and at times I express them passionately. That doesn't go down to well in this shitty corporatized society we live in, but there you go.

Garry,

You, sir, are a fucking clown. You're not worth a dignified response.

For writing the best letter I've yet read about this incident, anywhere. Kudos!

But the spirit of free speech enshrined in its wording most certainly does, Anonymous. Speaking of which, why don't you strip yourself of that chickenshit appelation and join the big team of those who aren't afraid to stand by their opinions??