Enough about Imus, please

A lot of people have asked me over the last few days what I thought about the whole Don Imus thing and why haven't I posted on Too Saucy about it.

Well, first, I'm a very busy man. But more importantly, I had nothing exciting to say and don't feel the need to post just for the sake of having a comment up. But now, please, can we stop talking about it.

We had numbnuts like NBC's David Gregory, who was hosting MSNBC's "Hardball" last week, saying it will open the door to a "national conversation about race."

Bullshit. It won't. Remember, the O.J. verdict and the Rodney King beating and the LA riots and God knows what else - they were all going to open a "national conversation" too. They didn't and this won't either.

Racism is America's constant and dirty little stain, and while things have certainly got better for black folks over the years, the racism is still there, bubbling under the surface.

Imus' defenders are fond of saying he was an equal-opportunity insulter, mocking everyone. But if they seriously don't see a difference between mocking George Bush or Hillary Clinton or Tim Russert and mocking a bunch of college kids, whose only crime in the eyes of Imus and his stooges were that they were black, then there's no conversation to have.

I've never been an Imus fan. I doubt I've heard more than 20 minutes of his show in my life - and he's been on the radio in the NY area since I obtained consciousness - so I shed no tears over his firing.

But there are people on the air, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, who say far worse things than Imus every single day yet seem to suffer no penalties. Dick Cheney runs to Limbaugh's hatefest whenever he wants a softball interview, in fact.

So spare me how the Imus firing is some meaningful step forward in race relations. It's not. It will be business as usual for the right-wing hatemongers.