While driving up from New Braunfels, I had a moment of clarity on the Imus issue and was going to write a long brilliant post on it.

Unfortunately, by the time I got up here Radley Balko had said everything I wanted to say, only better. He has the best take on the comment:

Imus isn’t a racist. He’s a misanthrope. He hates people. All people. His show made broad, possibly offensive generalizations about everyone on a near-daily basis. We now learn that the Rutgers women’s basketball team was apparently hurt and offended by the comments. But were they really? I’d hazard to guess that not a single one of them was listening to the show that morning.

The Right:

Of course, the conservative reaction to all of this is pretty stupid, too. “Look at all the rap music! They call women ‘hos’ too!”

No, you idiots. How typical. The answer to politically incorrect censorship is not…more political incorrect censorship.. Not to mention that Imus’ comment was stupid, lame humor. Hip hop is art. Sharpton and Jackson actually are going after hip hop. And their efforts to take words away from rap artists are every bit as lame (lamer, actually) than their attempt to take words away from clueless, aging disc jockeys.

The Left:

Drudge also reported the other day that many activist groups were protesting Imus to the FTC, as well, a’la Brent Bozell. Note to my lefty friends: When you’re imitating Brent Bozell, you’re doing something wrong.

And what I think is the most important point, so much that I made a big deal out of it in my first post on the subject:

I guess my point is that it’d be nice if all the energy spent the last two weeks expressing self-righteous outrage over a mistaken comment from a harmless old fool were instead spent on, say, the racial sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system, or the fact that a substantially higher percentage of black men are in prison in America than were imprisoned in South Africa during apartheid.

Read it.