"In the more printable Imus lexicon, Dick Cheney was 'a war criminal,' Hillary Rodham Clinton was 'Satan,' Oprah Winfrey 'a fat phony,' Newt Gingrich 'a man who would eat roadkill'..."

"Ted Kennedy 'a fat slob,' Steve Forbes 'a meanspirited creep,' Dan Rather 'a loony,' Rush Limbaugh 'a drug-addled gas bag.' Many listeners detected the toxins of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mort Sahl or Groucho Marx.... He was sued for defamation, denounced, ridiculed, shunned, hated and feared... After years on the edge of acceptable standards, however, Mr. Imus evidently went too far on April 4, 2007, when, in his trademark drawl, he referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, which had reached the N.C.A.A. finals and was composed mainly of African-Americans, as 'rough girls' and 'nappy-headed hos.'... In 1996, at the correspondents’ dinner in Washington, he insulted President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, who were there, and later referred to it as 'The Speech From Hell.'"

From "Don Imus, Radio Host Who Pushed Boundaries, Dies at 79/On the air, he was an irascible, confrontational growler who led pranks and parodies that could be tasteless, obscene and sometimes racist, sexist or homophobic" (NYT).

Goodbye to Imus!

Here's that "Speech from Hell":



ADDED: "The toxins of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mort Sahl or Groucho Marx"?! Those guys were all geniuses. We were blessed to have them in our midst. How did the word "toxins" get in there?

"President Barack Obama plans a government-wide review of federal regulations, aiming to eliminate rules that stymie economic growth."

"The move is the latest effort by the White House to repair relations with corporate America, hoping to spur investment by the nation's largest multinationals and reduce unemployment."

And here's the underlying Wall Street Journal op-ed by Barack Obama, which features an illustration of a man — not Obama... he looks a bit like Don Imus — in a gray business suit, running with scissors — running with scissors! — cutting his way through an abstract field of red tape. In the op-ed, Obama is all about carefully and thoughtfully weighing the value of particular regulations in relation to the burdens they impose, so the picture is amusingly inapt.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger says she's going to end her radio show and everyone seems to believe her.

But I don't! I accused Dr. Laura of doing a media stunt — saying the n-word over and over on the radio — to get attention, and — lo and behold! — she gets right onto the Larry King show. So far, so good, with this stunt.

Having made it to center stage, she makes a dramatic announcement:

“I want to regain my First Amendment rights,” she said. “I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.”

But she stressed that she was not retiring, only ending her show, and would continue to write books and appear at speaking engagements.

“I’m not quitting,” she told Larry King. “I feel energized actually — stronger and freer to say the things that I believe need to be said for people in this country.”...

Shortly after Dr. Schlessinger made her announcement, one of the groups that had called for advertisers to back away from her show, Media Matters for America, issued a statement applauding the outcome.

She's not quitting right away. That's a key clue. She's just "made a decision not to renew her contract when it expires at the end of the year." She's fighting back, lighting a fire under her supporters, betting — I think — that her audience will increase as a result of the new attention.

Media Matters may want to intimidate advertisers, and without advertisers her new contract negotiations would not have gone well. It's better to quit than to go down defeated.  But the controversy is also great leverage. If her ratings go up — and I bet they do — the advertisers will be there.

Think about it: Rush Limbaugh is still on the air, with plenty of advertisers. If the Media Matters strategy for destroying radio careers worked, he'd have been gone long ago. Yeah, the strategy sort of worked against Imus, but only temporarily, and it made him seem important and relevant (even as the "nappy-headed hos" incident was probably painful for him). 

So the time for end-of-the-year contract negotiations will come up for Dr. Laura, and we'll see what happens. I predict she'll be offered good money, and she'll announce a change of plans, along with heaps of self-praise for her bravery standing up for her First Amendment rights. Remember, she "feels energized," and she wants"to say what’s on [her] mind and in [her] heart," and she won't tolerate "some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent."

Stay tuned.

"Uncooked, organic foods such as raw sauerkraut, flaxseed and searingly hot habanero peppers."

What Imus "subsists mainly on."

It's the influence of his wife. He's been a vegetarian for 10 years, but his original idea of being a vegetarian was something I can really identify with. (I was a vegetarian for about 5 years a while back.) He thought: root beer and potato chips.

Yes, you know there are so many things you can eat and still be vegetarian. Most of the great snacks: ice cream, chips, candy, cookies. And all the great drinks: soda, fruit juice, beer, wine. It's only healthy if you make it healthy, which you may be less inclined to do if you're being gnawed at by that deep innate hunger for meat.

But if you can get a highly motivated, food-smart spouse to take care of you and control what food and drink arrives at your table, vegetarianism might work well. And you'll just have to take her/his word for it that sauerkraut is important or whatever crazy food theory she/he believes is true.

"The cover photo of the TIMES Sunday magazine depicts Limbaugh 'dark and sinister' in a theme of THE GODFATHER."

Ha ha. Well, the Times is expressing its own entirely appropriate feeling of intimidation — for the man who likes to call himself "a harmless little fuzzball." And the hot news is that Limbaugh has signed a deal for $400 million to do his show through 2016.

UPDATE: The NYT has now made the whole article available. (It's from the Sunday Magazine.) I'll read it and write something more in a few minutes.

MORE: The article, by Zev Chafets, describes his entry into Rush's Palm Beach studio:

... I was met by Bo Snerdly — a very large man in a Huey Newton beret — who glared at me. “Are you the guy who’s here to do the hit job on us?” he demanded in a deep voice.

“Absolutely,” I said.

Snerdly, whose real name is James Golden, held my eyes for a long moment before bursting into emphatic laughter.

Chafets describes watching the show.

Unlike Howard Stern or Don Imus, he has no sidekicks with him in the room. He does, however, keep up a running conversation with an unheard voice. I always assumed that this was just imaginary radio shtick. Now I saw that the voice was attached to a human interlocutor, Snerdly, who banters with and occasionally badgers Limbaugh via an internal talk-back circuit.

Yes, you can tell when you listen to the show that someone is talking to him (or perhaps writing to him). Occasionally, it's like a Bob Newhart telephone routine where you have to imagine what is being said on the other end of the line, and that's part of why it's funny.

From the interview:

“I’ve never even met [John McCain], never spoken to him,” Limbaugh said. “I’m sure there are things about him I’d like if we meet. This isn’t personal.” He then delivered a litany of the presumptive nominee’s personal failings — too old, too intense, too opportunistic, too liberal. But, he assured me, he would be with McCain in the fall. “It’s like the Super Bowl,” he told me. “If your team isn’t in it, you root for the team you hate less. That’s McCain.”

It already seemed, when I made my visit, that McCain’s opponent might well be Senator Obama, and I was curious to know how Limbaugh planned to take on America’s first African-American major-party nominee. “I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty,” said Limbaugh, who speaks of himself in heroic terms on air and off. “He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.”

I asked if he had any specific tactics in mind.

“I haven’t yet figured that out exactly,” he said. “You know, I’ve had a problem with substance abuse. I don’t deal with the future anymore. I take things one day at a time.”

That last line is self-deprecating and (I think) humorous, but I think he knows that doing things day-by-day keeps the show alive and makes it work. It's what works in blogging too. If you have a whole planned agenda and you just crank out the propaganda, people will get sick of you. It's when you are talking/writing to figure out what you think, to find out what you want to say, that you are interesting. (They didn't do that on Air America.)

More to come... I have to shut down this computer so I can unplug it. A thunderstorm is rolling it, and I want to survive.

MORE: Chafets shows some admiration for Rush:

But Operation Chaos was a triumph of interactive political performance art....

Such massive and consistent popularity makes Limbaugh a singular political force....

“Rush is just an amazing radio performer,” says Ira Glass, a star of the younger generation of public-radio personalities. “Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that trick off.”

Glass compares Limbaugh to another exceptional free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. “A lot of people dismiss them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows,” he says. “They both think through their ideas in real time on the air, they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for, they both created an entire radio aesthetic.”

Glass — who is one of the public figures in America who should be counted on those 2 hands — is absolutely right about Limbaugh and Stern. That explains very well why I listen to all 3 men. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Rush, Howard, and I have the same birthday.)

There's some interesting material about his expensive lifestyle:

There are five homes — all of them his — on the property. The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He’s been married three times but has no children.

Perhaps he'll leave a fortune to his cat.

A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

Remember, today's blog themes are: wealth, pets, and grotesque.

Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

Hmmm... Chafets should have listened to a few more shows! Liking the artwork isn't the same as liking the politics.

His staff lights fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day.

So he wasn't lying when he was going on and on about jumbo-sized, gardenia-scented candles the other day.

There's some good stuff about Rush's father:

To this day, Limbaugh calls his father “the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

Certainly he was one of the most opinionated and autocratic. “On Friday nights my friends would come over to the house just to listen to my dad rant about politics,” Limbaugh recalls. “He was doing the same thing as I do today, without the humor or the satire. He didn’t approve of making fun of presidents. He didn’t think that sort of thing was funny.”

It's funny how his father's behavior became the idea for the show. Imagine taking your father's cranky rants, making them funny and getting the whole country for your equivalent of the living room. Think about it. Think about ways you can emulate and one-up Dad. Are you replaying your father's routine in your daily work? My father used to trap me into discussions of all the big issues and drove me to tears by applying the Socratic method — he called it the Socratic method. He was all about requiring that I define my terms, recognize that my answers were "semantics," and explain how I was going to get "from point A to point B." And now here I am, a law professor. These things happen.

Dick Adams, Rush’s boyhood friend and high-school debate partner, told me: “Mr. Limbaugh didn’t suffer fools lightly, let’s just put it like that. Many times I was over there when he called down Rush or David in harsh tones. There was usually a string of expletives attached.”

Yikes. Later:

He is less like his angry father than his mature role models, Buckley and Reagan, for whom sociability and fun were integral to their conservative world view.

This is interesting:

Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at The National Review, watched Limbaugh’s tutelage under Buckley, and he takes Limbaugh seriously as a polemicist and public intellectual. “I hired a lot of people over the years, fancy kids from elite schools, and I always asked, ‘How did you become a conservative?’ Many of them said, ‘Listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ And often they’d add, ‘Behind my parents’ back.’ ”

This too:

Limbaugh works extemporaneously. He has no writers or script, just notes and a producer on the line from New York with occasional bits of information. That day, and every day, he produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk.

I thought he was reading off a script prepared by others much of the time. But he wants you to think this is just what bursts out of his head. It's damned impressive if it really does.

On Limbaugh's drug problem:

Being Limbaugh, he said he believes that most of these shortcomings stemmed from his inability to love himself sufficiently. “I felt everyone who criticized me was right and I was wrong,” he confided. But, he says, he left his insecurities behind in Arizona. “It’s not possible to offend me now,” he said. “I won’t give people the power to do it anymore. My problem was born of immaturity and my childhood desire for acceptance. I learned in drug rehab that this was stunting and unrealistic. I was seeking acceptance from the wrong people.”

How is that "being Limbaugh"? Isn't the need to love yourself stock advice in recovery programs? And doesn't Limbaugh usually ridicule the self-esteem movement?

On Bill O'Reilly:

He hadn’t been sure at the time that he wanted [his opinion] on the record. But on second thought, “somebody’s got to say it,” he told me. “The man is Ted Baxter.”

He likes Ann Coulter, Camille Paglia, Thomas Sowell, and Christopher Hitchens.

Nice article. A very positive, admiring picture of the man — not at all in keeping with the ominous cover photograph. There's some critique in there, but basically, it's obvious that the reporter had a great time hanging out with Rush Limbaugh.

Controversy.

Nontroversy.

NBC wimped out over "pimped out."

David Shuster said — about Chelsea Clinton — "Doesn't it seem like she's being pimped out in some weird sort of way?"



Now, MSNBC has suspended him, after pressure from the Clinton campaign:

Behind the scenes, Phil Griffin, senior vice president at MSNBC, took the criticism over Shuster's remarks from the Clinton camp especially seriously, and Tim Russert helped mediate the situation, according to sources.

But one high-level NBC source told Politico that apologizing was an act of cowardice on behalf of the network.

"This is at least the second time they've caved to the Hillary Clinton campaign," a source told Politico, referring to Chris Matthews' recent apology over remarks he recently made about Clinton that were widely denounced as sexist. "What does this do to journalism?"

Really, how bad is it to say "pimped out"? Is it "nappy-headed hos" bad? Did anyone think Shuster was literally calling Chelsea a whore or even making any reference to her womanly virtue? "Pimped out" is a common colloquialism these days. According to the Urban Dictionary, which gives a good read on how young people use words, the connotations having to do with exaggerated fashion and style predominate.

Even if the clear associations with prostitution remain, we often make figurative references to prostitution in speech, and the cause of feminism is not served by requiring special limitations when we're talking about women. We ought to be able to call a female publicity hound a "media whore."

I've never watched "Tucker," the show Shuster was guest-hosting when he made the supposedly offensive remark, but if the conversation there is casual and slang is the norm, then saying "pimped out" about Chelsea should be taken in stride. Otherwise it looks as though NBC caved to the Clintons.

ADDED: Ugh! Here's Shuster groveling:



"All Americans should be proud of Chelsea Clinton"? Why? Because, sublimely privileged, she went to work for a hedge fund? And, generally, why should anyone be "proud of" someone else's children? Plus, Chelsea isn't a kid anymore! I think saying "All Americans should be proud of Chelsea Clinton" is offensive. Please fire David Shuster.

AND: Out in the real world today, I had an encounter with the word "pimp." Plus, the dominant meaning of the word today — relating to style — may be the original meaning, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

pimp
1607, perhaps from M.Fr. pimper "to dress elegantly" (16c.), prp. of pimpant "alluring in dress, seductive." Weekley suggests M.Fr. pimpreneau, defined in Cotgrave (1611) as "a knave, rascall, varlet, scoundrell." The word also means "informer, stool pigeon" in Australia and New Zealand and in S.Africa, where by early 1960s it existed in Swahili form impimpsi. The verb is attested from 1636. Pimpmobile first recorded 1973.

MORE: The Moderate Voice has a big roundup of the commentary, which does not just break down along partisan lines. For example, Jane Hamsher said:

It may surprise everyone but I actually wasn't bothered by [what Shuster said]. The phrase is ubiquitous, I use it all the time and although it is a loaded term my initial impression was that in the wake of all the truly awful sexist stuff that's come down the pipeline from MSNBC over the course of this campaign, much of which I have personally railed about, this just didn't fall into that category.

At first I thought it might be because I know Shuster and don't think he has the women's issues that many on MSNBC seem to have, and maybe that was affecting my assessment of the situation. But I wrote a post recently about Ben Affleck appearing at a press conference for the SEIU in Boston, and shortly after it went live someone involved in helping me put together the story sent me an email wondering what the hell I was thinking linking to a headline that said something on the order of "Boston Mayor Pimps For Healthcare Workers." I wasn't sure what they were upset about either at the time, but after a moment I realized that the term probably didn't strike others as being as inert as it did me so I changed the link.

I understand that this situation is different, we're talking about a young woman and Hillary Clinton has been on the receiving end of a lot of really misogynistic and disrespectful shit from MSNBC and that on the heels of that, a comment which overtly compared her daughter to a prostitute probably did not sit too well. Still, if you asked me, I'd say that while I certainly understand that others might feel differently, for me this was a minor infraction.

And if anyone thinks my comment here is partisan, remember that I just defended Randi Rhodes (and I've been arguing the free speech side of nearly every dispute over the 4-year life of this blog).

John McCain to Don Imus: "Glad to have you back."

In case you were wondering whether Imus would still be able to get prominent political figures on his show.

And who should be most afraid? Hint: a quote from today's show:

"Not much has changed. Dick Cheney is still a war criminal, Hillary Clinton is still Satan and I'm back on the radio!"

And the answer isn't Dick Cheney.

"Wee embers were fanned into an inferno by skilled flame-fanners and the professionally offended."

Dick Cavett on Don Imus:

The Imus show had long been an eccentric mix of news, music, sports talk and — thanks to its well-read host — first-rate conversation....

There is really no getting away from the injustice that’s been done. A program enjoyed (and missed) by millions was trashed for the sake of the few. No one who contributed to the denouement of the Imus show and the mindless abuse heaped on him has anything to be proud of.

IN THE COMMENTS: It's all about... Hillary!

"Don Imus referred to my client as an unchaste woman. That was and is a lie."

Imus sued and got $20 million from CBS. Now, the basketball players are filing their lawsuits:

Today's suit refers to terms used by Imus April 4 -- including referring to women on the team as "nappy headed" -- as "debasing, demeaning, humiliating, and denigrating" to Vaughn and her fellow players. "There's no way these bigoted remarks should have seen the light of day," Ancowitz told ABC News.

I suppose the key question is whether anyone hearing Imus's (idiotic) remark would think it meant that the women actually were prostitutes. I think we often describe someone's appearance metaphorically. If you say, "she has a horse face," no one would take that literally. Such insults are rude, but they aren't lies.

It's hard not to be distracted by Imus's large pile of money. Would it kill him to share? But I'd hate to think one could win defamation suits on a theory like this.

I did just call TRex "doughy" the other day. But then, he said I had "snakes in [my] head," so I have a counterclaim. He's not literally made of dough, but then, neither is he a dinosaur, not literally. But this is a matter of rhetoric and writing/speaking style. Look at the big picture here. It's not just Imus. It's us.

The return of Imus.

Drudge has this "exclusive":

Radio host Don Imus has agreed to settle his claim with CBS for $20 million, and a non disparaging clause, legal sources claim. The move opens the possibility Imus will soon return to the airwaves -- on WABC in New York! Developing...

This is playing out predictably... and incredibly well for Imus. I'm sure he'll get back on the radio, with tons of publicity -- including this humble blog post. Think he'll be able to lure his big political guests back? I think he'll be able to get some sharp-tongued political analysts on the show right away.

UPDATE: AP confirms the story and adds:

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who led the move to fire Mr. Imus for his comments, did not immediately return a call for comment, he did say last month that he would not oppose a return to radio by Mr. Imus.

[Imus's lawyer Martin] Garbus had said Imus would sue for the contract’s unpaid portion. He cited a contract clause in which CBS acknowledged that Mr. Imus’s services were “unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical, controversial.”

The clause said Mr. Imus’s programming was “desired by company” and was “consistent with company rules and policy,” according to Mr. Garbus.

"If you ever laughed at anything or anyone on this list, you are a racist...."

How to get along in these post-Imus times.

Is this the end of shock jockery?

When CBS fired Don Imus, we heard a lot of agonized analysis about how there was something distinctly different about shock jockery that comes in the form of ridiculing specific individuals who were innocent, young, female, and attempting to enjoy a glorious moment in their lives that they'd worked very hard to achieve. But there's no such exquisite particularity in the post-Imus domino effect

"The Dog House with JV and Elvis," hosted by Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay, "will no longer be broadcast," CBS Radio spokeswoman Karen Mateo said Saturday...

Vandergrift and Lay broadcast a call to a Chinese restaurant in which the caller, in an exaggerated accent, placed an order for "shrimp flied lice," claimed he was a student of kung fu, and compared menu items to employees' body parts.

The initial airing of the call went unnoticed, but a rebroadcast after Imus's firing prompted an outcry from Asian-American groups. Vandergrift and Lay were initially suspended without pay, but Asian-Americans quickly demanded the same penalty applied to the much higher-profile Imus.

"This is a victory not only for the Asian-American community, but for all communities who find themselves constant targets of racist and sexist programming," said Jeanette Wang, an executive with the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Now, it seems, the company must demonstrate to each interest group that it matters as much as the last one that was able to extract a firing. You can listen to the prank call here. I can see firing them for being lame and bad. Maybe we've reached the end of shock jockery.

"CBS wanted him to do it... CBS wanted to encourage him and wanted him to feel totally protected."

So said Imus's monumental lawyer Martin Garbus.

Agents and media lawyers say one clause in Imus's contract, highlighted by Garbus, is highly unusual. It says his services "are of a unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical, controversial and personal character" and that programs containing these elements "are desired" by CBS and "are consistent with company rules and policies."

But other contract language, obtained by The Washington Post, will be used by CBS lawyers to argue that the company had "just cause" to dump Imus. These clauses cover "any distasteful or offensive words or phrases" that CBS believes "would not be in the public interest" or could jeopardize its broadcast license, as well as language that brings the company or its advertisers "into public disrepute, contempt, scandal or ridicule, or which provokes, insults or offends the community or any group or class thereof."

A CBS spokesman declined to comment, but two people familiar with the company's strategy, who asked not to be identified discussing possible litigation, said the Rutgers comments were so outrageous as to trigger several clauses that they maintain did not require a warning to Imus.

Garbus dismissed that argument, saying: "CBS's interpretation of the contract, stringing together words from here and there, would render the clause meaningless. Contracts are not interpreted that way."

It sounds like a great contracts case. High stakes too. The contract was worth $40 million, and he's going to claim other damages, covering "reduced income for Imus's private businesses and charities, as well as his future earnings in broadcasting."

It's smart to make the charities relevant like that, not only as a way to extract more money from CBS, but also to expose the jury to information that makes Imus very sympathetic.

This will be very interesting. Think Imus should win?

Big shot litigator Martin Garbus blogs that he "represents Don Imus in a dispute with CBS."

Then unblogs it. But, so, this is interesting. Is Imus about to sue the pants off CBS? This will be amusing!

Garbus represented Lenny Bruce back in the 1960s.

What Alec Baldwin said to his 11-year-old daughter.

I wasn't going to write about this, but now I see Stephen Bainbridge is talking about it, so that must mean it's not too tawdry to mention. An audio clip of a phone message from the actor Alec Baldwin to his daughter is now immortalized on the internet. Bainbridge writes:

If Don Imus deserved firing for what he said about the Rutgers' womens b-ball team, doesn't Alec Baldwin deserve to be fired from 30 Rock for calling his eleven year old child a "rude, thoughtless little pig"?

Yes, if only we could somehow get an audio clip of the meanest sounding tirade each parent has ever unleashed on a child, we'd have grounds to demand that we all get fired. And kids, don't answer the phone, tempt that parent into leaving a recorded message. Because with the internet, you can have sooooo much fun with recordings. Or do you think only a rude, thoughtless little pig would make such a damaging recording public?

Alternate take, from one of Bainbridge's commenters: "Awww, c'mon why don't you just man up and say that you think what Imus said was no big deal?"

Why NBC?

Everyone wonders why the murderer chose NBC to receive his package of promotional materials. Does NBC have some special reputation for evil PR?

Well, NBC had been conspicuously in the news, as it dealt with the Imus story. But it cracked down on Imus, so if anything, its immediate reputation is for being puritanical and moralistic. Maybe Seung-Hui Cho wanted to be shamed. But maybe it was just the most famous network at the particular moment when he had to make the decision. Or maybe it's just outright offensive to try to perceive the reason in a decision by a patently deranged mind.

Should we condemn NBC? Here's the way you could go with that:

Don Imus calls some young women "nappy headed hos" and we're all supposed be to shocked, shocked I tell you. Cho blows away 32 human lives and not only do we hear no condemnation of the vile person from the big media, but NBC is going to oblige the piece of human debris by airing his "manifesto." Democrat presidential contenders refuse to appear on a Fox Network debate, citing bias, but I guess it's okay for NBC is going to realize Cho's dreams of celebrity status at the expense of 32 lives.

Cho may have been a deranged psycho, but he was sharp as a scalpel when it came to playing NBC News for his personal patsy. Anything for a point in the ratings. I'm sure the families of the deceased will appreciate the Cho Show as much as they appreciate [NBC News President Steven] Capus's inevitable defense of freedom of speech and the public's right to know. Though I don't NBC will delete any of Cho's possible references to "nappy headed hos."

There's just so much wrong with that free-swinging attack. For one thing, professional journalism isn't about expressing condemnation or praise. It's about reporting newsworthy facts. There shouldn't be extraneous statements of condemnation. Imus, on the other hand, was an employee of the company, and a business decision had to be made about whether to continue the affiliation.

Moreover, it's ridiculous to think that a mass murder demonstrates that we shouldn't also be concerned about things less horrible than killing. Of course, calling someone a bad name hurts much less than a murder, but the existence of murder doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about our more ordinary social interactions.

What Imus did is trivial compared with murder, but all normal persons already understand that murder is wrong and we're not likely to cross that line. But we really aren't sure where the lines should be with respect to speech about race and sex. We don't understand the full effect of what we say, and we don't agree about how far satire can go and when listeners are being oversensitive. So there's plenty of good reason to talk about this, much more, in fact, than about the vicious murderer.

Audible Althouse #82.

It's a podcast. About Austin, Texas. Omakase. Driving 1235 miles in one day. Don Imus. Torturing a man by telling him he looks like Mr. Bean. Etc.

You don't need an iPod. You can stream it right through your computer here.

But all the passionate people subscribe on iTunes:

"There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books."

NBC chief White House correspondent David Gregory has good insight into Imus (in this really well-done Newsweek piece by Weston Kosova):

"Imus was living in two worlds. There was the risqué, sexually offensive, sometimes racially offensive, satire, and then there was this political salon about politics and books. Some of us tuned in to one part and tuned out the other ... Whether I was numb to the humor that offended people or in denial, I don't know."

This article seems to be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Don Imus. Consider this, which shows the special power he had to skewer politicians and mainstream journalists, including the ones who couldn't pass up the air time:

Between insults, he gave politicians and journalists... lots of air time to discuss serious issues and plug their books. He asked real questions and then listened to the answers. The show became an influential salon for the politically connected. Powerful people tuned in to hear what other powerful people would say. For a certain segment of status-obsessed journalists, being called names by Imus was better than not being called at all. Imus had a talent for coaxing his guests into saying what they really thought, often in salty language they'd never use on more "respectable" shows....

Imus may have come off as your deranged, half-addled uncle (he kicked booze and drugs years ago), but he also came to the microphone each morning carefully prepared for battle. He read more books and newspapers than most of his guests and was a formidable interrogator who could cut the powerful down to size. On a recent show, Imus badgered Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, a frequent guest, about the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed hospital. Schumer tried to go for the high-and-mighty approach, castigating Republicans for failing the troops. Imus pounced. When was the last time Schumer visited the troops at Walter Reed? Deflated, Schumer haltingly admitted he hadn't been there in years.

We need to think about why people were so hot to bring him down. Kosova provides the time line:

[U]nknown to Imus, one of his most loyal listeners in Washington, D.C., was watching, and taping, the show every day.... 26-year-old Ryan Chiachiere wasn't a fan, and he wasn't tuning in to be entertained. Chiachiere is one of a handful of young activists who spend their days wading through hours of radio and cable shows for Media Matters for America, a liberal group whose sole purpose is rooting out and "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Wired on coffee, Chiachiere was watching a recording of Imus's show when he noticed the "hos" remark.

It was a big hit at the group's morning meeting....

The group posted a video clip of the exchange on its Web site and put it up on YouTube. It sent e-mails to journalists and civil-rights and women's groups.

The word, and the outrage, spread quickly. A week later, Imus was gone, banished from his multimillion-dollar television and radio show even before he had the chance to complete the all-too-familiar cycle of public penance that high-profile sinners are usually granted.

That is, Media Matters had been lying in wait for a long time, and finally they got exactly the sound bite they needed, and they played it masterfully. Think about why things fell into place so well and why so many people fell in line and took down this idiosyncratic character, who had been talking on the radio four hours a day, five days a week for so long. Who knows what havoc he might have wreaked in the 2008 campaign? Isn't it convenient to have him out of the way?

Or do you support the rehabilitation of Imus?

In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, Imus said, "I could go to work tomorrow. Bigger deal. More money. TV simulcast ... I've got a summer of kids to cowboy with and then we'll see." He knows what he said was wrong, and that there is much to do. Asked whether his recovery from addiction had given him the strength to cope with the current crisis, he sounded like, well, Imus: "I'm a good and decent person who made a mistake in the context of comedy," he wrote in the e-mail. "My strength comes from not being full of sh— and a coward."

Our political world is full cowards and folks who are full of shit. Is Imus really the one you want gone?

Ho.

Don.

Died.

Can anyone get the seemingly obvious joke just right? Apparently, not.

A man died, people. Show some respect. Or don't. But if you can't come up with a good joke at least, go with the respect for the dead angle. That's my recommendation.