piling on

Well, I guess I would lose my already endangered blogger cred if I didn’t say something about Don Imus. So here it is: Good riddance.
Now, what about his enablers — the guests, sponsors, and networks that kept him and his foul mouth on the air all these years? Really, they’re like a bunch of kids who egg on the class clown but play dumb when he gets caught and leave him to take the punishment alone.
Imus wasn’t born yesterday (unless by “yesterday” you mean “sometime during the Holocene Epoch“) . He wouldn’t have been filling up airtime with that kind of trash if he thought he’d get in trouble for it. The networks were paying him to be coarse and vulgar. So he did coarse and vulgar, and was paid big bucks to push people’s buttons, and he happen to push the wrong button during a slow news week and now he’s been hung out to dry.
“We are shocked — shocked! — that he would say such a thing!” If anyone should be apologizing to the Rutgers team, it should be CBS and MSNBC, for putting Imus on the air and giving him the idea that it would be remotely okay to say such a thing. (Followed by the record execs who are getting rich off the filthy rap music that puts slurs like that out there.)
People who don’t use words like that don’t have to apologize for them. Our society had boundaries and rules for a reason. But when you’re always trying to “push boundaries” and “be edgy” it’s only a matter of time before you fall over the cliff.