Everyone deserves a second chance in life, and that goes for leathery old reactionary gits who look like Worzel Gummidge's homeless alcoholic substance-abusing brother being attacked by wasps in a hailstorm – and Don Imus, too.
Back in the springtime, Don Imus briefly became the new Mel Gibson when he attracted a racial firestorm by claiming that a female basketball team all looked a bit like Pampers-loving pieces of horticultural equipment or something, and he was promptly sacked from his radio show as a result. But now Don Imus is back, and presented his first show on WABC-AM just hours ago. And to show how much he's progressed, Don Imus unveiled a brand-new non-racist team including two black comedians. True, they spent the entirety of Don Imus' show locked in a cage wearing loincloths, eating watermelons and singing My Mammy, but a start's a start.
Don Imus is basically the Montel Williams of spring 07, only instead of threatening to blow up teenage girls, Imus referred to an all-black female basketball team as a bunch of "nappy-headed hos." In a world still reeling from Mel Gibson's anti-Jew "sugartits" rant and Michael Richards' less inventive racism, that vaguely obscure insult was a step too far and Don Imus was speedily fired from his CBS radio show.
Not that Don Imus has been completely inactive since then, though – he's used his self-enforced unemployment to blowtorch the limpets off his face, sue CBS for firing him on the grounds that he was only employed by the broadcaster to spout off a relentless torrent of racist woman-hating nonsense in the first place, and plot his comeback like some sort of Machiavellian scarecrow with an especially large amount of time on its hands.
And now it's paid off. As reported back last month, Don Imus has got himself a new radio show on WABC-AM, and it started just a few hours ago. Recorded live at Manhattan City Hall – and featuring the shitstorm-quashing stylings of black comedians Karith Foster and Tony Powell – Don Imus seemed to spend most of the show pleading with the audience to forgive him for being such a foolish old racist. Seattle PI quotes:
"I didn't see any point in going on some sort of Larry King tour to offer a bunch of lame excuses for making an essentially reprehensible remark about innocent people who did not deserve to be made fun of … I will never say anything in my lifetime that will make any of these young women at Rutgers regret or feel foolish that they accepted my apology and forgave me. And no one else will say anything else on my program that will make anyone think that I didn't deserve a second chance… Other than that, not much has changed. Dick Cheney is still a war criminal, Hillary Clinton is still Satan and I'm back on the radio."
These next few days will be among the toughest that Don Imus has ever faced, at least professionally – personally he still has to top that time a dog mistook his sleeping face for an old shoe and started gnawing at it – as he will discover whether his audience of angry rednecks will forgive him for saying something the bulk of them probably agreed with in the first place, and whether he can maintain his shock-jock reputation without resorting to racism again.
That second one will be a piece of cake, though – we read in Don Imus' notebook that he's going to steer clear of trouble from now on by just making a lot of jokes about Jordan's disabled son.
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