Imus blast away

Parent Cafe
421

<p>The reason it’s so tiresome to debate you or conyat, AM, is because of your continual attempt to paint all conservatives with quotes such as the above.</p>

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<p>I never said I greatly admire all conservative pundits. I most definitely do not admire Bill O’Reilly, for example. I said I hadn’t heard them spew hate–and I haven’t. I said their programs are a legitimate source of information. </p>

<p>I have never listened to Savage. Based on the above, he sounds like a nut case to me. Why hasn’t he been gotten rid of by now, a la Imus, especially since MM has been in place since 2004? Too small a fish in the sea, maybe? Perhaps you can start the ball rolling.</p>

<p>From the Media Matters website:</p>

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<p>Idmom (#407) “Cynic that I am, I truly believe that once the media circus leaves town, there will be no serious, thought provoking discussion of race relations in America. The media circus serves as a hindrance to progress, no doubt. But apathy is a hindrance as well.”</p>

<p>I’m afraid you’re probably right, Idmom. Alas. … Serious, thought-provoking discussions of profoundly important issues such as foreign and race relations, health care, poverty, and war, will never take place on the necessary broad scale, as long as so much of America is fixated on presidential sexual pecadillos, celebrity drug overdoses, which star is too fat or too skinny, and who got stopped for DUI. Honestly, it’s just depressing.</p>

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<p>All Imus proves is if your income comes from someone else… you have to think before you speak. Imus forgot in many ways, he’s no different than the guy who asks if you want fries with that…</p>

<p>That should be a bit of a wake up call to folks that if they depend on someone to write them a check, they are an employee… subject to the whims of the employer. </p>

<p>I always love people who do the I’m a enginer (designer, tech, etc…) I’m not a salesman. When someone else writes the check you’re a salesman, even if you don’t know it, or in Imus’s case forgotten it.</p>

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<p>HH–“I never said I greatly admire all conservative pundits. I most definitely do not admire Bill O’Reilly, for example. I said I hadn’t heard them spew hate–and I haven’t.”</p>

<p>This afternoon I was listening to Rush Limbaugh during my lunch hour drive home. At one point, in the midst of one of his generic tirades against those who disagree with him, he said: “Liberals don’t believe in God because they think that they ARE God.” Excuse me? I know I’M not God (though I’m not sure Rush has this same self-awareness.) Nor do any of my liberal friends believe in their own divinity; most of them are actually quite religious and spiritual. Then he went off on the “femi-nazis” of the world (the Clintons, Pelosi’s, and apparently any strong, successful, ambitious, independent, smart woman who has a political perspective to the left of his.) … Maybe “hate-spewing” is too harsh a term, but certainly “purposeful, mean-spirited distortion” and “nasty name-calling” are not. …
By the way, HH, I enjoy debating with you, and we’ve even agreed from time to time. Not on this, however.</p>

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<p>I guess that’s kind of a riff on Ann Coulter’s Godless, Hindoo. I can understand how you would have taken that remark as being hateful.</p>

<p>You have to understand that the coin of the talk radio realm is hyperbole. I think most listeners understand this.</p>

<p>I still think it’s interesting that you enjoyed Imus, and yet take offense at Rush’s show today. I even read an article that Elinor Cliff of Newsweek watched Imus as her “guilty pleasure.” </p>

<p>As I said, I only listened to Imus for a few months in 2001 and 2002, but the stuff I heard him say on a regular basis was just ugly</p>

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<p>HH–I apparently have a twisted sense of humor. While Imus often took things too far and offended even my dull sensibilities, I also sometimes found his grumbling irritability to be curiously funny. (Perhaps it’s because I’m cranky as well, and think hostile thoughts quite often about too many things–though they’re only in my sorry little head!) … Imus was a good interviewer who hosted some interesting guests (you’re right–plenty of liberals and moderates, but also some conservatives), and lively discussion. I’m sorry that he was also an egocentric, foul-mouthed man/boy who too often seemed to revel in his meanness. … I’m going outside to work in my garden. As parents of college-aged kids, I’m sure that all of us CC moms and dads–conservative and liberal alike–are heart-sick over what happened today at Virginia Tech, and the news seems only to be getting worse. I need some air.</p>

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<p>LOL Opie.</p>

<p>Sticker, I’m confident that there are various points of view in the conservative movement. It’s just that, IMO other voices, such as George Will, get supressed by the shouters and by folks whom invent or repeat tales of questionable authenticity. Liberals do this too much also.</p>

<p>One thing I’ve debated with friends who are, I guess, vehemently opposed to conservatives is their fear of some interesting conservative ideas. During my post-undergraduate days in the south I met many southern conservative white males. There were a few knuckleheads with some clearly anti-democratic views (no kidding folks, including a gent who believed that protections of the U.S. Constitution were only for real property owners. He ended up disbarred, I heard), but most were smart, level-headed and fair-minded thinkers. A funny story; I was on campus in the library lounge on one ocassion reading, yes, The National Review. A good old boy whom I was moderately acquainted with approached me smiling and said, “hey, I didn’t know that you were one of us.” I returned the smile and with a brief laugh said, “I like to keep track of the enemy.” It was all in fun of course. We all respected one another.</p>

<p>I still typically vote Democrat, but the best ideas I have heard about restoring troubled cities, for example, came from Newt Gingrich, a guy I wish would at least run for President. I also wish that Lamar Alexander would have stayed in the race the year he entered the Republican primaries. I guess my biggest complaint about SOME conservatives is, as I said, the meaness and insults. Yes, not a lot of conservatives, and too many liberas are equally guilty (I cannot abide Randi Rhodes or Sam Seder on Air America). If I painted too broad a brush earlier, that wasn’t my intention. Although please allow me this: I’m no doctor but Ann Coulter is literally insane.</p>

428

<p>The specific issue between Imus and the Rutgers team appears to have been resolved - between them. Imus has apologized. Then team has accepted the apology and asked to move on.</p>

<p>As for any larger issues, such as…</p>

<p>Idmom (#407) “Cynic that I am, I truly believe that once the media circus leaves town, there will be no serious, thought provoking discussion of race relations in America. The media circus serves as a hindrance to progress, no doubt. But apathy is a hindrance as well.”</p>

<p>Hindu (#422) I’m afraid you’re probably right, Idmom. Alas. … Serious, thought-provoking discussions of profoundly important issues such as foreign and race relations, health care, poverty, and war, will never take place on the necessary broad scale, as long as so much of America is fixated on presidential sexual pecadillos, celebrity drug overdoses, which star is too fat or too skinny, and who got stopped for DUI. Honestly, it’s just depressing.</p>

<p>there is this from Newsweek …</p>

<p>"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.”</p>

<p>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.”…</p>

<p>Imus’s wife, Deirdre, tells Newsweek that her husband will be back. “When he’s in front of a microphone again, it will be about how to heal the issue of divisiveness and race. That is what’s in his heart. No one else will conduct this conversation. No one else would talk about autism and Walter Reed.” "</p>

<p>…you might want to listen … just in case</p>

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<p>During Dr. King’s lifetime, I heard the same kind of criticisms about him that I now hear about Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. That he inflamed situations; that he got people all stirred up and encouraged people to think of themselves of victims; that he was just in it for money or publicity; that racist acts by themselves are benign (good, even), it’s only the outside agitators who do any real harm.</p>

<p>There really is nothing new under the sun.</p>

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<p><a href=“http://americablog.blogspot.com/[/url]”>http://americablog.blogspot.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Good clip here from 60 minutes. Imus is asked if he used the n word in a particular conversation. He denies it. The interviewer asks the other person who was in the conversation, who confirms it, and Imus very non-chalantly says, “Well then I used that word.” Wasn’t even a big deal to him.</p>

431

<p>I’ve stayed out of this after it denigrated into the usual CC back and forth fighting, but I’ll duck in real quick to say, “Conyat, are you out of your ever loving mind?”</p>

<p>Are you really somehow comparing Martin Luther King and what happened in his lifetime, including the criticism he received for his words and actions that brought about REAL CHANGE to the spewings of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson? Have you listened to some of the HATE filled diatribe from the two of them? Have you listened to some of the SERMONS given where they speak of HYMIE town and Jews and hatred of white people. </p>

<p>Give me a break - you’ve lost all credibility with me…</p>

<p>But, whatever.</p>

432

<p>Rev. Al is no MLK, but I didn’t get the impression that Conyat was comparing the two leaders. I thought he compared critics in the two eras.</p>

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<p>As my 15 year old said last night when we were watching the news, “the Virginia Tech incident puts things in perspective. Maybe the Imus issue will go away.”</p>

<p>Pretty perceptive comment from a child.</p>

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<p>OT: Ah, 1SM: your 15yo is not a child. Not an adult, either, and there’s the rub. And there’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that says you don’t know exactly what you have at any moment until you make an observation…Heisenberg was such a smart parent.</p>

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<p>^ Really ??? (She actually turns 15 in two weeks, she’s currently 14.;))</p>

<p>Because in the context of this thread, the college basketball players have been referred to as children by some. Didn’t their coach even make such a reference to their impressionable youth? But yet they were strong resilient women.</p>

<p>What would Heisenberg say about that?</p>

<p>A Heisenbergian slip…?</p>

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<p>I still find it interesting that so many non-black people seem so invested in dictating what responses are appropriate for the black community to have about this incident. Do we tell Chinese-Americans that they can’t wear white to funerals because we find it inappropriate? If the Rutgers women found Sharpton’s and Jackson’s defense of them to be appropriate, who are we to judge that by our own ethnocentric standards?</p>

<p>And going back a few pages, I find it more than just a little ironic that the real reponsibility for the death threats being received by the women are being blamed on those of us who have criticized Imus, because we’re “divisive.” By what logic are racial insults and death threats less divisive than saying those things are not acceptable?</p>

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conyat~
Though I’m quite sure this wasn’t your intention, you have inadvertently made an extremely racist remark in the above statement. Why do you feel that the “black community” shares only one sentiment and one voice? THAT is an inherently racist idea. :frowning: CC’s own poetsheart, who <em>also</em> happens to be a member of the “black community,” wrote the following:</p>

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<p>One doesn’t have to be of any particular race to detect the malevolence of Sharpton and Jackson. To say that each and every disapproving view of them by a non-black person is racist is to infuse racist intent into views that have their roots in logic and rationality, not racism. </p>

<p>I have NO idea how the Rutgers women feel, and frankly, neither do you. Neither of us has spoken with them privately w/o the media hype.</p>

<p>~berurah</p>

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<p>I know how they SAID they feel, because I took the time to read their statements. I have no reason to believe they are liars. </p>

<p>For some reason, I don’t find it all that hard to believe that they would be offended at being called hostile names…or grateful to someone who bothered to stand up and say that doing so was wrong.</p>

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<p>Perhaps I should have said “members of the black community”. Point taken about the infelicitous wording. However, the reason I said that is because some of the posters here are indeed trying to dictate how black people as a whole are supposed to feel; that whoever doesn’t agree with one black sportswriter is being “divisive”–the one sportswriter who, with all the coverage male college athletes get, begrudges the Rutgers women even 3600 seconds to talk about their season and what happened to them.</p>

<p>That’s what I meant–not that all black people felt the same. If you’ll recall, I’ve been pointing out all along that there is more to the story than just Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. And just like poetsheart, I’ve raised the point that no one is forcing the mainstream media to hang on their every word.</p>

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<p>Just a point a bit off the above-beaten trail. I feel quite free to criticize George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al, and their motives. Is there any reason I shouldn’t feel just as free to question and/or disapprove of Sharpton and Jackson? Or are they off-limits to me because they’re of another race? I’d like to think we’ve traveled a bit farther than that. Or have we?</p>

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<p>That’s kind of a straw man. No one said you couldn’t hold your own views about Sharpton and Jackson. My concern is with those who are trying to twist this incident so that only black people, individually and as a group, are “really responsible” for what a rich, powerful, white man chose to do.
And to create such an oppressive society that it’s more acceptable to commit racist acts than to say those acts are wrong.</p>