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I found some good in Don Imus; Now fire him

My grandma used to tell me that if you looked hard enough and long enough, you can find some good in everybody.
So I spent a few minutes this morning looking for something good about Don Imus.

It’s certainly not his looks.
This radio talk show host is one ugly dude.
He certainly has a face made for radio.
He’s 66 years old but doesn’t look a day over 90.

And you don’t need a whole lot of talent to make a living being a radio shock jock.
(See Howard Stern.)
Just be crude and rude and somebody will pay you for it.

But I found something good about Don Imus.
He and his wife Deirdre founded the Imus Ranch, a working cattle ranch in New Mexico -- a charitable organization that helps kids with cancer as well as siblings of SIDS victims.

Having said that, Imus should be fired for the “nappy-headed hos� remark he made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team that he made on the air last week.
Now usually when Jesse Jackson starts hollering for someone to be fired, I take the other side.
But if Imus gets out of this with only a two-week suspension, then someone owes Jimmy the Greek a big apology.

What got the Greek fired by CBS back in 1988 was pretty harmless compared to Imus’ stupid remark.

First of all, Imus said what he said on the air.
The Greek was eating lunch in a Washington restaurant -- and probably having a couple of cocktails to go with it -- when a reporter came in and stuck a microphone in his face, turned on a camera and asked what he thought about the civil rights record of pro sports.
It was Martin Luther King’s birthday.

An NFL analyst for CBS at the time, The Greek said that the league had all white coaches at a time when black were dominating on the field. He said management was about the only role a white guy had in the NFL any more.

Al Campanis had been fired from his front office job with the Los Angeles Dodgers earlier because he stupidly said blacks weren’t qualified to do what he did.
The Greek had only said that whites were doing everything possible to hang onto their jobs.
Had he stopped there, nothing probably would have happened.

But then the cocktails probably kicked in and The Greek started rambling on about how slave owners took their big black men and mated them with big black women in order to have big black kids. With his mouth now in full overload, he kept on talking about “the thigh situation.�

An outcry followed and The Greek vanished from the NFL Today set.

Now Don Imus should vanish from the airways.
But that won’t happen.
There’s a vast radio market out there for stupidity.
Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern are living proof.

Posted by at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)