The Conservative Soldier

Don Imus was amused by “rough looking” basketball players. David Letterman found humor in a “slutty looking” public official.

Two mean spirited, ill-timed comments by on-air personalities. But look closer. Different targets. Different results.

Radio host Don Imus in 2007 was vilified as a racist/sexist and was fired after he stepped over the line while joking about the appearance of female collegiate athletes. Earlier this week, TV talk show icon David Letterman unleashed brutally pointed, scripted jokes directed at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her daughter after both visited New York City.

Making unscripted, unrehearsed remarks on his New York-based, televised radio show (which aired on cable’s MSNBC) two years ago, Imus was chatting off-air with a sports commentator and the show’s lead producer about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. Imus had watched parts of the Rutgers-Tennessee game the previous night.

The comments were made when the radio show was in a commercial break on CBS Radio. However, MSNBC audio and video was rolling at the time. That detail is often lost, or ignored.

“Those are some rough girls,” Imus said of the Rutgers players. “They’ve got tatoos. Those are some nappy headed whoahs, man.”

Initially, Imus was suspended two weeks after a public apology. Ultimately, he was fired by CBS Radio in response to advertiser backlash. It took Imus more than eight months to return to the airwaves. His show was picked up by ABC Radio in December 2007.

Letterman, reading a scripted monologue, stood before millions of viewers and said: “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee (baseball) game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

Letterman claims he did not know the Gov. had visited New York with her daughter, Willow, 14. He assumed the trailing daughter had been the more well-known Bristol, an 18-year-old unwed mother. In either case, his punch line was rooted in the absurd notion that the teen-aged daughter of Alaska’s governor is carrying A-Rod’s love child.

“Am I guilty of poor taste? Yes,” he said on CBS last night. “Did I suggest that it was okay for her 14-year-old daughter to be having promiscuous sex? No.” He did not suggest it. He said it.

During his famed Top 10 segment, Letterman outlined 10 things Palin did or said while in the Big Apple. No. 2 in the Top 10: Palin bought cosmetics at Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight attendant look.”

Essentially, Letterman’s woeful attempt at humor at Palin’s expense stepped every bit as far over the line between humor and sexist tastelessness as Imus. Letterman inferred that the 14 year old (or, as he insists, the 18 year old) engaged in sexual intercourse with a Major League Baseball player. He more pointedly said the Gov. of Alaska chooses the appearance of a prostitute.

The contrite apology should not be acceptable and Letterman should be banished. Would the joke have been less brutal had he specified that Rodriquez impregnated the 18-year-old Bristol? Ask a father of an 18-year-old how graphic humor about a daughter’s sexual frolicking would go over around the office water cooler.

As I am writing this, I have found only a handful of editorials suggesting Letterman should be suspended or fired. In fact, the Huffington Post reported two days ago that CBS is close to rewarding Letterman with a two-year contract extension. His current annual pay is north of $30 million.

There is no doubt whatsoever that Letterman gets a free pass from the media because he is an established left wing, Bush hating liberal, who is infuriated by Palin’s conservative stance on social issues. And it is obvious there is another, unspoken difference. Letterman’s joke targets were white women from Alaska. Imus was chuckling about black women from New Jersey.

What would the reaction be if a different white male, say, Don Imus, took the “slutty flight attendant” line and went off on a few well know liberal Democrat females? I can only imagine there would be not only calls for his permanent exile from radio but death threats as well if the names Ginsburg, Pelosi, Obama or Sotomayor were uttered in the same sentence with “slutty”.

Racist? Sexist? Disrespectful? Hateful?

As we are reminded once again this week, that depends entirely on who says it and about whom it is said.

As your unwavering Conservative Soldier, I am not afforded the comfort or security of living in a bastion of American values and patriots. I come to you week after week from the front lines, from the place that spawned and nurtured Barack Hussein Obama, from an ethical, moral and economic wasteland clinging tenuously to its heritage as The Land of Lincoln. It is today, in stark contrast to Lincoln’s legacy, the land that produced the rocks that Obama, Sens. Dick Durbin and Roland Burris, Rod Blagojevich, et al, crawled out from under.

Today I realized that I am done with the tired logic by the Kool-Aid swillers that goes something like this: President Obama “inherited” myriad problems. We have to give him a chance to show that he has proposed the right solutions going forward. Just give the man a chance.

How did we get from Change to Chance so fast?

This is what people say when a football team hires an unknown coach. This is what PTO moms tell themselves over coffee after the school board brings in an avant garde principal. This is what we tell our kids when they’re frustrated by an activity they can’t seem to master.

Give it a chance. Don’t give up so fast.

This is very good advice for our children. But do we, at the same time, tell them, “Sure, play with the matches. You are not likely to get burned, let alone set the house ablaze”?

If we are willing to chance the demise of the America we have known, the America so beloved by the millions of people around the world, the America that is a beacon of liberty and that embodies the best of mankind, then we are by extension willing to give Socialism a chance, nationalization a chance, Fascism a chance. And on it goes. Where does it end? Do we then give Islamic radicalism a chance?

There is a jarring quotation, around for decades, by the author Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), jarring in that it sends shivers through every fiber of anyone reasonably alive: “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”

Should Americans turn away from this looming dark period, returning to daily routines, Dancing With The Stars debates and other frivolity, all the while determined to “give Obama a chance”, I am convinced it will be at our peril.

To the extent there is a honeymoon between any U.S. President and the people he serves, please, for the love of God, let us declare this one over. Done. No one deserves a chance to strip us of our liberties or impede the march of freedom.

No one deserves a chance to stack the Supreme Court with racist radicals. No one deserves a chance to subvert the rule of law. No one deserves a chance to bankrupt our nation and our futures. No one deserves a chance to appease tyrants.

The only chance that we can cling to now is the chance that American voters will rise up in 2010 and 2012, determined to avert our rapid descent into one of the “darkest periods of human history.”

Even as it slips into certain oblivion, swept away by the undercurrents of financial obsolescence, long-term strategic negligence and societal change, the mainstream media continues its droning about the legal rights of America’s enemies, the evil intentions of the George Bush presidency and still, unconscionably, denies the threat to our way of life posed by radical Islamic jihadists, a.k.a., terrorists.

I don’t know what is diminishing more rapidly, the media’s credibility or its relevance.

A recent example is a lengthy profile in the May 10, 2009, Chicago Tribune Magazine. Like the Sunday newspaper into which it’s inserted weekly, the Trib magazine is a flimsy imitation of meaty, compelling Sunday journalism of a nearly forgotten era. In the latest Trib Mag, the cover story is heralded by an ominous black-and-white photograph of the frail hands of a faceless prisoner, accompanied by a grim headline, The Guantanamo labyrinth.

As expected, the inside piece is thousands upon thousands of words of condemnation of the Bush Administration, and apologies for the United States of America, masquerading as a “profile” of a “courageous lawyer” from Chicago, Candace Gorman. Thirteen paragraphs set up the deliberately (I suspect) buried, and highly flawed, premise of the piece by Tom Hundley.

“In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the highest-ranking officials in the Bush administration … met in the White House and quietly agreed to override some of the basic provisions of the U.S. Constitution that protect individual rights. They also decided to disregard the Geneva Conventions and to sanction the use of torture …”.