the best Imus commentary

Here’s Sally Jenkins, who understands not just the concept of freedom of speech but its great benefits and advantages—namely, that speech leads to dialogue, which often leads to improvement and progress (a lesson that seems to have been lost on that great constitutional scholar Barack Obama):

It serves no purpose to call for Imus’s job; that’s mere harsh vengeance and we’ve had enough undue harshness. If you shut down Imus’s show, silence him, the conversation ends there. What’s needed in the Rutgers-Imus affair, and on the subjects of racism and sexism in general, is not silence but talk, lots of it …

The Scarlet Knights … have a chance to get something more meaningful from him: a full-fledged conversion.

Jenkins really drills down to our everyday reality [e.a.]:

But regardless of what anyone thinks of Imus, you don’t cure prejudice by curbing speech. Clearly, as a society we’ve made the uneasy decision that censorship is more dangerous than sensitivity, otherwise Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t get work. Words are hurtful, but for the most part they’re inactive. Censorship is an action. As columnist John Leo succinctly put it, “No insults means no free speech.”

And, most painfully and honestly, Jenkins describes the cost of this incident for the young Rutgers players [e.a.]:

You can argue about whether Imus “scarred me for life,” as Ajavon maintains, but he left a mark. The Rutgers kids assumed that the winner’s circle was colorless and genderless, and Imus disabused them, abruptly, of that notion with one harsh sentence. He cost them that ideal. To a certain extent, he hardened their hearts …

Yes indeed.

Here are a few other athletes whose ideals have been lost, and who have had their hearts hardened.

Seligmann said he wondered how other innocent suspects, who did not have well-to-do-parents to hire high-priced lawyers, could prove their innocence while pursued by an aggressive prosecutor. “This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” he said.

I think about this a lot—how brutal our culture has become, how thick a hide we all have to have. And also about how the culture of political correctness is a big lie that leaves people unprepared to contend with reality—to the detriment of the very people that political correctness claims to “protect.”

As I keep saying: the world is upside down.

And here’s the latest: Imus struck back at Al Sharpton today. And he says he has apologized enough.