A trool on Eschaton, responding to a commenter's opinion of the trool's extreme disappointment at the firing of Don Imus, to wit that "TCB is just mad that the "Angry White Man" segment of the American public doesn't have a spokesman on the radio anymore," replied:
Imus was center-left, idiot.
Texaschilibean | 04.15.07 - 8:24 pm
The angry white-man segment , of which the mis-informed TCBeaner is clearly a specimen, is still amply represented by the usual suspects, whose names so depress me that I am loathe even to type them. But you know who I mean; Imus was never in the same class of prostrate propagandist for power that is the lot of O'Shrilly and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber...
No, as far as politics were concerned--as distinct from, say, crude cultural stereotyping--Imus probably was the most non-partisan, equal opportunity asshole in the bidness of being an asshole. To my mind, given the persona he created and inhabited, his tasteless crudeness in his 'roast' of the Clintons was almost balanced by his excoriation of Darth Cheney as a war criminal.
Imus was a uniter, not a divider, and he united along a particular axis: he had particular talent was to pick the low-hanging fruit along the cultural/class divide, and mash on it like a Gallagher fruit basket. And, not unlike like Gallagher as well, Imus did it mostly for the delectation of an audience composed of angry, middle class white males of varing ages but of similar complaints. These are the guys who now spit the term "PC" with the same scorn as they once wielded "NIGGER," "SPIC," "CHINK," and "GOOK." They feel their patrimony had been stolen from them, since they may no longer with impunity voice--and significantly, no longer benefit from--their crass and gross biases and prejudices against those whose social weakness had hitherto made them easy targets for derision, scorn, and contempt.
For the likes of the TCBeaner, of course, these middle-class heroes there is weaker prey close at hand: women. So they turn their repressed fury against women, because women are, obviously, easier targets. Patriarchy already has created all the negative stereotypes necessary for the transference of the aggression generated by middle class white males deprived of the occasion to act the 'superior' by the extension of verbal and behavioral immunities.
It is, in the vocabulary of the TCBeaner, et al, in fact much to be preferred that women become their surrogate enemies, because 1) women are a much weaker target, and one which can usually be counted upon merely to weep, not whip out a pair of brass knuckles and take out all your teeth.; and 2) because women have been getting uppity lately and if there's anything a threatened, angry middle class white male bigot doesn't need, it is some goddamn cunt telling him what to do.
Imus' slur against the Rutgers players was the worse because there probably was no personal malice in it at all. Imus noticed the Rutgers' girls tats...and that immediately marked them as his social inferiors, if the color of heir skins, and their natural endowment of hair had not already done so; it rendered them fair game.
So when he engaged his "nigger-joker", Mcguirk, in banter about the distance between the standards of pulchritude demonstrated by comparison of the Tennessee girls with the Rutgers girls, and the latter were found wanting, they immediately became--for Imus and his audience--skanks and hos, a topic much beloved by the WHITE audience for mysegynistic hip-hop...
Now Imus is toast*; I seriously doubt that any of explicitly political assholes--who not incidentally to their own schticks engage in similar racist/classist/sexist commentary will face similar fates...
*I predict Imus will be back on radio within one Friedman Unit.
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