The Rude Pundit says "Firing Don Imus Stinks":
No, no, for the Rude Pundit, this doesn't pass the smell test, this whole Don Imus thing. You know the smell test - when you pick a pair of panties up off the floor and sniff them to see if they're not too rank to wear. If they smell okay, then you put 'em on, confident in your decision and able to go about your day. But if they stink and you still wear 'em, well, hell, then you'll just wonder when people are gonna sniff the air around you and know that you are foul.
(…)
The real solution is to use speech to combat speech, not silence. Rather than getting Imus fired, why not get people to stop listening? And if they don't, if they wanna listen, well, fuck, you lost then. But you need to keep trying to get people to shift away from one way of thinking. Just because you got rid of Imus doesn't mean the sentiments go away. Just because you come up with some pussy voluntary ban on the word "nigger," or you say "the n-word" instead, doesn't mean the word or the feeling goes away. Civil discourse? Fuck that. It's not possible. You don't change hearts and minds by silencing people. (The Rude Pundit has called for Ann Coulter to be kicked out of newspapers, but not for her pathetic little wet spaghetti slap insults - it's because she says things are facts that are, in fact, lies.)
Then there's the sacrificial lamb. That Don Imus is just a surrogate for our own inability to articulate a dialogue about these issues without yelling at each other on Fox "news." That, yes, admit it, it isn't possible to think about what Imus said without thinking about the rampant sexism of hip-hop (that, yes, Al Sharpton, showboating glory hog he may be, is also working to address). That Imus is taking the hit for the place of that speech in our culture and the endless degradation that cuts across race and class lines.
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