I am a talk radio listener. I have been for the last ten years. My station of choice is WABC in New York.

If I happen to be in the car around lunch time I catch a little of Rush Limbaugh. I don't buy everything he says, and too much of his show seems to be about him. About how he's been attacked by the left or the "Drive-By Media" this week. But he does manage to do it all in an entertaining way.

On the drive home I get a dose of Sean Hannity. Not always as entertaining as Rush but he has good guests. He has a list of leftist regulars that he can get to call in and debate. Most of the time he's too nice to them.

Mornings were tough. The morning show team for years was Curtis Sliwa and Ron Kube. Sliwa, who founded the Guardian Angels, was the "conservative" voice. Though hardly what I would call and intellectual conservative. Or often even an intelligent conservative. Kube is a criminal defense lawyer and a socialist. Their banter was occasionally amusing. Just often enough to make the show tolerable. I mostly listened for the news breaks.

WABC got rid of the Curtis and Kube show and, I'm sure at great expense, replaced it with Imus in the Morning.

I never listened to Imus before the whole Unfortunate Incident. Like any radio show there were people who loved it and people who hated it. Being a fair minded person I decided to listen and find out for myself. After all he couldn't be worse than the two clowns he was replacing.

The first couple of weeks were interesting if only for the novelty. It did seem that the better I got at understand what Imus was mumbling, the less interesting the show became. Then on the anniversary of the asassination of Martin Luther King, Imus interviewed Jessie Jackson. This, I thought, had potential.

Jackson is a notorious race baiter and bullshit artist. Imus had just returned to the air after the Unfortunate Incident. Would Imus have the stones to challenge Jackson or would he give him free reign for whatever nonsense he wanted to spout.

It turns out that the only stones Imus has are the ones he apparently puts in his mouth before he starts talking.

He asked Jackson if he thought Obama's association with Reverend Wright would hurt his campaign. Jackson immediately leapt to Wright's defense.

He defended Wright by attempting to explain and justify Wright's sermonizing that 9/11 was "America's chickens coming home to roost." According to Jackson al Queda's justifiable anger with America arises from the fact that we "invaded and occupied" Saudi Arabia.

While it is true that Bin Laden got his panties in a bunch over the presence of U.S. Troops in Saudi Arabia, our being there hardly represented an invasion. I think the "i" word Jackson was looking for was "invitation."

Did Imus challenge Jackson on this lie?

No. He let it go without comment. This leaves me with three possible explanations. He doesn't know any better, he agrees with Jackson, he's too affraid for his new job to take even the slightest chance of being labeled a racist again.

Either way I'm switching from Imus in the Morning to iPod in the Morning.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 08:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment