Red State chimes in on the Don Imus-says-racist-crap issue. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
To be sure, Red State nitwit du jour Dan McLaughlin dutifully stresses that what Imus said was "indefensible." Characteristically, however, he feels compelled to place this condemnation within its correct ideological context: "Imus endorsed and relentlessly touted Kerry in 2004, so let the Left defend him" -- a comment that makes little logical sense, though it admittedly does display a certain partisan mental flexibility that would have been appreciated by sophisticated political theorists along the lines of, say, Joseph Stalin.
But what really gets on Red State's tits is that the Rutgers womens' basketball coach, Vivian Stringer, was so gauche as to call a press conference to allow her players to publicly express how they felt about being called "nappy-headed hos." No, really. That's what they're mad at over there.
Imus' remarks were crude and ugly, but the lesson Stringer should have been sending these young ladies is that they say a lot about Imus but nothing about them. Different people handle these things differently, but a coach worth his or her salt could have played this at least two perfectly reasonable ways. One is to laugh it off with the traditional "sticks and stones" attitude, and show the players that this really shouldn't mean anything to them; there will always be people who say inappropriate and mean-spirited things in life, and you shouldn't take that seriously. A more combative personality of the Bobby Knight variety would respond by taking some personal public potshots at Imus, drawing the story away from the players and into coach vs. shock jock; this would teach the players the valuable lesson that when somebody sucker punches your people, you hit them back in kind and teach them a lesson....
Put more succinctly, when someone calls you a 'nappy headed ho,' you should not feel the need to call a press conference to deny it. Maybe these young women don't know that - but if they don't, it was the business of someone in a position of authority to teach them. Shame on Vivian Stringer and Rutgers University for failing to teach them that.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who thinks the best way to handle a tense & delicate situation is to emulate Bobby Knight is probably an idiot.
But beyond that, this is an interesting argument: paraphrasing, "The real problem with this hideously offensive racist and sexist speech is not so much that a rich and influential white guy uttered it, but rather that this coach is so silly as to actually be offended by it."
The confusion here perhaps stems from the symptomatic wingnut inability to grasp that people get upset by offensive speech because it offends them. No, McLaughlin assumes that it's all about point-scoring:
It's the Culture of Victimology at its most destructive, teaching these young women that they should consider themselves to have been genuinely maligned by an aging boor and to seek out the status and posture of one to whom a deep wrong has been done and who is owed.
No, he really said that. McLaughlin's just making a slightly more advanced version of the flimsy "it's just a joke!" defense, a ploy that has great appeal to those who are, well, never ever going to be in the position of being called a "nappy-headed ho" -- and who don't particularly want to deal with the meaning of the fact that such remarks are not quite the aberration that they'd like to think.
I mean, McLaughlin says this explicitly: "there will always be people who say inappropriate and mean-spirited things in life, and you shouldn't take that seriously." And what his words mean sails right by him: "young black women need to be told that they will always be liable to get called sexist and racist names, and they need to learn to be cool with that and not to make any embarrassing scenes."
The willful self-blindness here is staggering. It's also pretty much wingnut dogma, their own version of identity politics, their own special denomination of Victimization Cultism. Pathetic.
UPDATE: Oh, some of the comments in that thread are just great, too --
When the coach and the ladies call a press conference and condemn rappers like Mims and that ilk, then I'm willing to listen and consider their "outrage". Until then, it's just a whiney press conference.
Work to change the culture or just get over it. By their silence about rap music lyrics, they are in large measure responsible for Imus "offense".
Wow! And this one:
Yep, it's the "white" folks victimizing da po' black folks by buyin' the black rappers trash.
Classy.
UPDATE: Wow. Red State throws a fit worthy of Althouse.
Impressive.