God, how depressing and awful. I’ve listened to Imus for years, and my dad listened to him for years before that while I was a kid. So I feel like I speak with some authority when I say that he’s OBVIOUSLY not a racist. He flipped out at the race-baiting ads that the Republicans ran against Harold Ford, he ranted for weeks about how Harold Ford lost because people were racist, he flipped out at the racist push-polls that the Bushies ran against John McCain, he’s done tons of charity work for sickle cell anemia, he and his wife work with inner-city kids with cancer, he and his wife help green inner-city facilities, every MLK Day he plays the entire “I Have a Dream” speech even though the station tells him not to because people tune out, he listens to and plays and has on black preachers, and on and on and on.
He’s also OBVIOUSLY an equal opportunity offender. He makes fun of old people (“time to head out to the dog track”), fat people (“tubbo”), bald people (“bald-headed stooge”), gay people (“half a fruit salad”), Catholics (“stop hosing little children”), Jews (“boner-nosed beanie-wearing Jew-boy”), born-agains (“religious whack-jobs”), liberals (“Commies”), conservatives (“Nazis”), Dick Cheney (“lying war criminal”), Hillary Clinton (“Satan”), Ray Nagin, George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Rosie O’Donnell, Joy Behar, Cardinal Egan, Dan Rather, Larry King, Katie Couric, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Clinton, Don Rumsfeld, and on and on and on. And he hates the Iraq War, for whatever that’s worth.
And he’s done a ton of good work, for pediatric cancer, adult cancer, SIDS, sickle cell, autism, wounded veterans, slain veterans’ families, the environment, and on and on and on.
Plus his show is funny! And he has good guests. And it has good country music if you like that sort of thing.
His ouster is being presided over by professional greivance-mongering hucksters like Sharpton and Jackson, but mostly by the countless powerful people he’s pissed off. Fox News and CNN and CBS and Stern and the Daily News and rival jocks and politicians he’s gone after and pundits he’s gone after smell blood in the water. Looks like they’ll get him.
Sucks.