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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
C'mon Joan, I posted the MSNBC news in your last letters section on this subject. I want my Red Star! WAAAAAAHHH!
Seriously, good job with your comments.
Joan hates rap. Good for her, she's proven how good she is.
Well you know what -- I love rap, the same way I love Raymond Chandler.
That's what rap means to me -- it's art, which means it's fiction. Even when it's fiction about the gritty ugly real world, it's still fiction.
And I will fight to protect the right of any fiction writer to write fiction, even fiction that bothers Joan Walsh.
KStone, I'm running late but...I did find out the news from you in my thread, as I was trying to catch up on letters while writing another post! Thank you! I owe you.
And...I don't hate rap, I didn't say that, friend. I like some, don't like some. More later...
By reading the headline, I thought Imus had been fired from his job. He has not. MSNBC can't fire Imus. They don't employ him. They dropped his radio program. CBS employs him and they have not fired him (at least not yet, according to the latest news), though they have suspended him for 2 weeks.
While I can't defend what Imus said, there is a major double standard. He was rewarded for being on the edge and saying shocking things. Now, he says something that is shocking and is punished above and beyond what a reasonable person would expect (or at least I think I am reasonable) for doing pretty much what he has always done.
I don't think the response was appropriate considering his history. If you want to change the rules, then you have to give the guy a chance after you change the rules.
And it wasn't his first trip into the realm of creepy, racist humor: Just a few weeks ago McGuirk ridiculed Sen. Hillary Clinton for African-American inflections that crept into her speech in Selma, Ala
Joan, did you miss "Hillary vs. Obama: It's a drawl!" ?
Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year.
Christ. Either eat your cake or have it. You are seriously going to make the argument that mocking Hillary's drawl is "creepy" when you ran a featured article that made that very same point?
Have you totally lost any ability to look in the mirror? Your criticisms of Coulter, Malkin, Imus - they all apply to your own columnist.
You've lost the right to complain about these sorts of things.
The more you blather about Imus and Malkin the more it betrays your own hypocrisy. Your line of reasoning is completely disingenuous as you steadfastly refuse to apply the same standards to your own little provocateuring troll.
Your newfound respect for research and careful argumentation, your tut-tutting over ad hominem attacks - it gets old fast when you clearly don't believe a word of it.
I heard the tape. It was funny. I'm not an Imus fan but he was shafted. This is another piffle to keep any read news from soiling the virtual front pages of news sites.
Say, did anyone other than me read that the Duke lacrosse team was completely cleared? Is that not news? Anyone read about the two white kids who were kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered by blacks? One of those stories that just doesn't seem to merit any ink, eh? Anybody notice the 19:1 ratio that blacks murder whites?
"Nappy headed hoes"? THAT makes your blood boil?! Could I borrow your rose-colored glasses? I seem to have lost mine along the way.
Oh, and that "Hymietown" comment from Jesse Jackson in 1988? Did HE resign from the campaign? Or is that somehow different?
But there is a double standard at work. Why is there no outrage at Beck, Coulter, Limbaugh and Boortz to match that at Imus?
Because, it seems, it's only par for the course for the right wingers. It's simply expected. And because it's expected, for some reason, it's tolerated.
But wasn't it expected of Imus?
What we really need is a national conversation about race and sex and language. It seems like what's happening is more like a bunch of people talking at and past each other.
I'm sure that Imus was caught off guard by the uproar, as he's been saying this sort of stuff for years, with no repurcussions. It's also true that far worse goes out over the airwaves every day, with no repurcussions.
I haven't actually heard his apologies, so I can't judge how sincere they are, but it does seem like there should be a place for atoning for one's wrongs. It seems like we have fuzzy lines, but when it's deemed that someone has crossed the fuzzy line, retribution is swift and total.
There also seems to be little or no gradation of punishment. I have to think that Imus is wondering "gee, nobody said anything after all the other stuff I said."
I've often wondered how the producers and station managers for these shows can sleep at night, and why, apparently, they don't ever say to the talkers "you know, the stuff you said today is repulsive."
So, the talkers keep pushing the bounds of decency, and every once in a while, one is deemed to have crossed the line. Most of them cross the line all the time, yet they continue to do so without consequence.
I also have to wonder if Imus is a sacrificial lamb because he has been critical of this administration and the war in Iraq.
Imus has been doing the same shock comedy for years and years. (He's been around longer than Howard Stern for heaven's sake.) He is consistently crude, racist, homophobic, sexist, and often just plain mean. In theory, this sounds like awful radio. However, he has the ratings to prove that people enjoy this. So, the question is, why is everyone so upset now?
George Carlin has a line in his bit on the seven words you can't say on the radio where he says something like "radios have two useful buttons, one that turns it off and one that changes the channel." Maybe we would all do better to take that to heart.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
