rted that the hospital had documented trauma consistent with rape. When the rape was originally announced by the media, it was said that the women were called racist names, assaulted and spat upon etc., by the Duke Lacrosse team. The retraction issued by the supposed victim did not retract, or call into question these other aspects of what reportedly happened that night, including the racial slurs and insults, and punches and bruises. If this is lies, they are lies the media told, not Sharpton or anyone else. Since it is not a crime to call women whores and nappy headed, etc., this was not an issue relevant to the retraction, but the fact that the incident at Duke had racial overtones is clear, and that is why people like Sharpton got involved.

I think most Americans are tired of the incessant racial drivel that has become so popular in our culture whether it is spewed from the mouths of White supremicists, or Black, or Jewish or anyone else. We need to wake up and realize that our country is being divided and pitted against itself for reasons that seem pretty clear. Do you want government censorship of our airwaves? What are the alternatives if people cannot censor themselves with good judgement? Imus may have been made an example, so others will get the message to clean it up, and to show good judgement! Today the EU is deliberating whether or not to make Holocaust denial a crime. Do we want government thought and speech policing in the US? That is where we are heaed if we keep creating excuses for people to claim that they are being hurt and defamed by media personalities, etc., who get away with little or no consequence. An apology is obvioulsy not sufficient. Imus apologized for calling the African American PBS personality Gwen Ifill a "cleaning lady" did that stop him from calling the African American ball players "nappy headed hoes"? Obvioulsy not. Imus thinks the formula is to insult people and apologize, but it's not. The public wants those who have been granted priviledge to show good judgement.

Imus got fired because people have ran out of ideas about how to protect this country from mindless people who do not understand the impact of what they say. He will no doubt get a satelitte radio deal, a venue that is more appropriate for his style of entertainment, which is a good and fair compromise between those who want government imposed censorhip, and those who don't. This is not about Imus. Imus is not a pitiful man that is in need of a fan base that issues death threats to innocent people, while dividing and weakeneing our national unity with racists diatribe. I would say the same to Sharpton and others. It's time for us to wake up and to decide to hold this country together. I'm not suggesting that we must sanitize reality, and we do have racial issues in the US, but the entertainment airwaves is not where these issues will be debated and resolved, and shock jocks will not be the arbitrators, or the mediators.

I like Pat, but respectfully disagree with him on this one.

Anisa

Larry wrote: The Imus Lynch Party by Patrick J. Buchanan

In the end, it was not about Imus. It was about us.

Are we really a better country because, after he was publicly whipped for 10 days as the worst kind of racist, with whom no decent person could associate, he was thrown off the air?

Cards on the table.

This writer works for MSNBC, has been on the Imus show scores of times, watches Imus every morning, and likes the show, the music and the guys: the I-Man, Bernie, Charles and Tom Bowman.

And Imus is among the best interviewers in our business. Not only does he read and follow the news closely, he listens and probes as well as any interviewer in America. Because he is a comic, people mistake how good a questioner he is.

Is "Imus in the Morning" outrageous? Over the top at times? Are things said every week, if not every day, where you say, "He's going too far"? Yeah. But outrageousness is part of the show, whether the skits are of "Teddy Kennedy," "Reverend Falwell," "Mayor Nagin" or "The Cardinal."

And when Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "tattooed ... nappy-headed hos," he went over the top. The women deserved an apology. There was no cause, no call to use those terms. As Ann Coulter said, they were not fair game.

But Imus did apologize, again and again and again.

And lest we forget, these are athletes in their prime, the same age as young women in Iraq. They are not 5-year-old girls, and they are capable of brushing off an ignorant comment by a talk-show host who does not know them, or anything about them

Who, after all, believed the slur was true? No one.

Compare, if you will, what was done to them – a single nasty insult – to the savage slanders for weeks on end of the Duke lacrosse team and the three players accused by a lying stripper of having gang-raped her at a frat party.

Duke faculty and talking heads took that occasion to vent their venom toward all white "jocks" on college campuses. Where are the demands for apologies from the talk-show hosts, guests, Duke faculty members and smear artists, all of whom bought into the lies about those Duke kids – because the lies comported with their hateful view of America?

And hate is what this is all about.

While the remarks of Imus and Bernie about the Rutgers women were indefensible, they were more unthinking and stupid than vicious and malicious. But malice is the right word to describe the howls for their show to be canceled and them to be driven from the airwaves – by phonies who endlessly prattle about the First Amendment.

The hypocrisy here was too thick to cut with a chainsaw.

What was the term the I-Man used? It was "hos," slang for whores, a term employed ad infinitum et ad nauseam by rap and hip-hop "artists." It is a term out of the African-American community. Yet, if any of a hundred rap singers has lost his contract or been driven from the airwaves for using it, maybe someone can tell me about it.

If the word "hos" is a filthy insult to decent black women, and it is, why are hip-hop artists and rap singers who use it incessantly not pariahs in the black community? Why would black politicians hobnob with them? Why are there no boycotts of the advertisers of the radio stations that play their degrading music?

Answer: The issue here is not the word Imus used. The issue is who Imus is – a white man, who used a term about black women only black folks are permitted to use with impunity and immunity.

Whatever Imus' sins, no one deserves to have Al Sharpton – hero of the Tawana Brawley hoax, resolute defender of the fake rape charge against half a dozen innocent guys, which ruined lives – sit in moral judgment upon them.

"It is our feeling that this is only the beginning. We must have a broad discussion on what is permitted and not permitted in terms of the airwaves," says Sharpton. It says something about America that someone with Al's track record can claim the role of national censor.

Who is next? And why do we take it?

I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person, says Imus. Indeed, whoever used his microphone to do more good for more people – be they the cancer kids of Imus Ranch, the families of Iraq war dead now more justly compensated because of the I-Man or the cause of a cure for autism?

"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality," said Lord Macaulay. Unfortunately, Macaulay never saw the likes of the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.

Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion – and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.

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