"WHA'HAPPENED?" If you are one of those people who makes a very good living by making offensive comments (and if you are such a person, welcome to Tapped!), life must seem quite arbitrary. One minute you're rolling along, gleefully encouraging politicians and journalists who should know better to laugh along with you, or saying that the 9-11 widows are "enjoying their husbands' deaths," and there are grumbles but the money keeps rolling in.
Then all of a sudden one day, newspapers start dropping your column, MSNBC cancels your show, and so forth. Hey, who changed the rules?
It really does seem like something changed rather abruptly around the same time as the election, though it wasn't quite the same thing. Don Imus has been a repulsive sexist, racist character for years. Not to minimize what he said about the Rutgers basketball players, but there's nothing profoundly more disgraceful about those statements than a dozen others. Just as there's nothing all that much more disgraceful about Coulter's line about John Edwards than her usual biennial bid for attention. It's as if we woke up one morning and the conservative movement didn't seem so intimidating and casual hate was something we didn't have to put up with.
Let's take this opportunity to give proper acknowledgment to TomPaine.com, in its first incarnation when it combined a web journal with an effort to use the paid space on the New York Times Op-Ed page (made famous by Mobil's op-ads) for liberal purposes. TomPaine.com was on the Imus beat back in 1999 and 2000, when their pleas to mainstream journalists not to legitimate Imus fell on deaf ears. I must admit, I thought it was a bit of an idiosyncratic crusade at the time. But Philip Nobile, who wrote a lot of those pieces, including two op-ads, one of which the Times wouldn't print, and John Moyers, the founder of TomPain.com, deserve some recognition now that the world seems to realize that they were right. The archive of TomPaine.com's Imus material is here.
--Mark Schmitt.
