i think that we've become almost scarily good at crusading in this country. i'm watching the news tonight in my hotel room in cold-ass boston, ma and i see that don imus has been dropped by NBC and that the charges against the duke lacrosse players have been dropped. i know that i shouldn't do it, but i cruised the 24 hour news stations to see if ANYONE sees the irony or the lesson in those two stories. surprisingly enough, the only station to have a commentator that said what i was thinking was on fox news. at least the commentator was a former democratic strategist though.

i mean, yeah. if imus had called me or someone i loved names on national television, i would have been ticked off. but, i think that its a pretty fair stretch to go from name calling to racist, sexist and just generally being a WHITE man on tv that doesn't know when to shut up. and then we get the crusaders up in arms - al sharpton and jesse jackson (though he seemed ominously quiet this time around, didn't he?) and that crowd. i mean, really. has anyone seen MTV lately? or BET? has anyone seen BET's After Dark program lately? are you kidding me? i saw a commentator on television screaming that imus and his comments clearly showed the slow and steady decline of american morality. i guess this woman (and i could believe this of her) never heard big daddy kane rap about pimpin' and how it ain't really that easy.

i don't know. i'm not trying to defend what he said, and i'm not saying that he shouldn't be punished in some way for it. the one thing that we continue to forget about free speech is that oftentimes there are real consequences for opening your mouth and then sticking your foot in it. personally, i thought the two week suspension (hopefully without pay, though i doubt he would have noticed) was more than sufficient. it just seems that more and more often you see examples of media-types and talking heads JUMPING to conclusions about situations and are more often than not WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. case in point, duke lacrosse. 'nuff said, right?

whatever.

i don't mean to make an argument based on scale. you know what i mean, right? i don't mean to say that since imus didn't drop the n-bomb, it's ok and we should just get over it. imus isn't as bad as rap music, so we should just get over it and move on. i'm not saying anything like that. what am i'm saying is that we should practice a little battlefield triage here. we still have war raging in the middle east. we still have ever burgeoning national debt that threatens to consume all in cloud of economic stagnation. we still have utterly moronic and CRAZY people that want take all the corn in the US and stuff it into SUVs and trucks (GOD, don't get me started on ethanol and biodiesel) . we have a President and attorney general who politicize the law and its execution, do it in broad daylight, and then try (and seemingly succeed) to set the terms under which they will deign to be questioned about it. but, imus said nappy-headed ho's on national tv and radio so let's flood the news outlets with that AND the fact that the photographer is the real father of anna nicole's baby.

oh, ok. that makes sense.