For one thing, there's the voice. It's one of the great instruments to grace the radio waves, solo. It was a pleasure to listen to even when he was whining, or at his most half-baked and juvenile, which was often.
Then there was the music. One consolation for the great riffs of country and western and rhythm and blues, brother Fred from his auto parts store in Santa Fe. How do brother he loves him on national air time?
And even if he often failed to exercise it, you knew detector, one capable of spotting hypocrisy whether it was being spouted by Ted Kennedy or Tom DeLay. There was also the sense, even if it suffered regular setbacks, that he was always listening and learning. It wasn't just the books he hawked to his audience, or the steady stream of erudite guests.
It was Imus himself, who gave every indication that him. In the past year, along with a good chunk of his audience, Imus had finally decided he'd been hoodwinked by the Iraq invasion. In typical Imus fashion, he quickly took interesting and fun.
What didn't was the inevitable backsliding into bigotry. This would begin whenever the show was slowing down. Most of the time the toxic stew was moronic private detective Bo Dietl (and, until he went one step too far, the execrable Sid Rosenberg whose sports boy act himself, as he fatally did when he took McGurk's to the Rutgers women's basketball team.
But more often than not the host would sit back, chortle along with the appalling lines, then voice a verbal "tut-tut" to indicate he knew that a line was being crossed, but that he wasn't encouraging this ear-grating nonsense. You knew there had pumping pimps." Likewise, you knew that Imus woke up every him wild, nuts enough to decide to play a wiseass race card No, what's really astonishing, particularly now that the topic is being hashed over on every blog, newspaper and talk show, is that none of Imus' eminent guests, who and politicians, apparently ever thought the show's racist You'd want to think that the likes of Tim Russert, it.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but the thought lingers so. That forced to choose between sophomoric bigotry and opted for the latter. But no one ever made him choose.
As far as we can tell, Washington Post reporter and pal to knock it off. Nor was Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, another Imus favorite and minder of the country's media manners, ever heard complaining about his host's bad And no wonder. Having Imus tout your columns or your least a few thousand extra sales, as New York Times Book admits in a confessional column in Sunday's paper.
Also on Sunday morning, on NBC's Meet the Press, there was an exquisite moment when Gwen Ifill, the former Times as a "cleaning lady" by Imus, looked Russert and Brooks in Earlier in the week, Ifill wrote that she didn't even - until she read it in a 1998 column by Lars-Erik Nelson, the late Washington columnist for the Daily News. Nelson would have been a great Imus guest. He was a brilliant and passionate writer who knew how to speak in sound bites, was expert on foreign and domestic policies, and knew who did what and why inside the Beltway.
But unlike Alter, Kurtz, Russert and the rest, Nelson had the bad manners to frequently confront Imus about his tastelessness. He had the effrontery to ask Senator Joe Lieberman, another Imus intimate, why he'd railed about anti-Semitism on the Senate program. Nelson called Imus up and asked him to account for his behavior.
Imus apologized, privately. But he never asked Nelson on the show. He didn't have to.
He had What's even MORE astonishing AND disappointing, is that none of Imus' eminent guests, who included many of the nation's most prominent journalists and politicians, mustered any courage to rise to his defense. Instead they scattered like roaches when the kitchen light comes on.
Posted by: at April 16, 2007 11:55 AM
And, what's really REALLY astonishing AND disappointing, is that none of Imus' eminent guests, who included many of the nation's most prominent journalists and politicians, mustered any courage to rise to his defense.
Instead they scattered like roaches when the kitchen light comes on.
Posted by: at April 16, 2007 12:02 PM
yes, i also miss Imus already, and i'm sure there are thousands if not millions out there wishing he was on the air. the funny thing is those that wanted him off the air never listened to him while he was on the air nor during his endless apologies.
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