Planet Abell

D on Imus is back on the air. Has it been six months already? Did I miss the national conversation about race while I was out at Starbucks? As a very smart friend told me during that frenzied week that saw Imus outed, ousted and banished, this was "Bonfires of the Vanities II." Sadly, sequels are almost never better than the original. But if George Steinbrenner got back to running the Yankees a couple of years after being banned for life , I guess Imus doing morning drive time before Spring's leaves even change color is nothing. Imus's trajectory is immaterial to me . I wasn't a fan so I wasn't sad to see him go. But I did hope that this time, at least, something would somehow justify yet another pagan dance around the bonfire. Instead, Imus looks wronged and he's been paid off for his trouble. What a Difference 150 Days Make "Imus in the Morning" and the MSNBC simulcast was canceled in April after Imus referred to the mostly black Rutgers ...

T he death spiral for Imus came incredibly quickly — sentence carried out a week after the — and incredibly slowly — hard to accept that his media bosses were "shocked shocked" days after the offense and after lots of counties were heard from. A very smart friend was the first to my knowledge to make the "Bonfires of the Vanities" allusion: "It's a Tom Wolf novel now," he wrote me, "not a 'conversation' about race." But let's try to keep it a conversation about race or at least a conversation about standards and the price(s) for violating them. I'm not sorry to see Imus go. But I was not a fan so I don't really count. He does have some friends loyal enough to say that the punishment did not fit his crime (and the less convincing "I know this man's heart" stuff). Bill and Hillary, Sure. But Essense and Kia? The remarks of his undoing, while typical after a fashion over the course of his career, were ...

D on Imus has been suspended for two weeks starting next Monday for referring to the Rutger's women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hoes." The suspension will take his MSNBC morning drive time simulcast off cable, and CBS — which owns the New York City station where Imus' radio show originates as well as the company which syndicates him — will also keep him off the air for that period. Imus has engaged in crude humor with a cast that does terrible and insulting impersonations of public figures for many years. Everyone puts up with it; his program is also flypaper to big-name politicians and a regular staging area for NBC journalists talking up their own projects so it has anchored itself firmly in the mainstream rather than the fringe. The Rutgers' team are not public figures, and did nothing to even merit his attentions. It is the randomness of the comments, as well as the stinging stereotypes they conjure, that shocked pretty much everyone. It was ...