On Imus, German rabbits, and more.

"Solidarity Forever, Pal!"

In the Don Imus vs. Al Sharpton celebrity tag-team cage match that obsessed Washington last week, and which ended with the radio jock's firing for racial insensitivity at the hands of his risk-averse CBS and MSNBC bosses, THE SCRAPBOOK has to confess that it couldn't work up a rooting interest either way. As National Review's Rich Lowry noted in his syndicated column, the controversy over Imus's calling the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" was "almost entirely a liberal conflagration." Which is to say, from our admittedly jaundiced point of view, it was a sort of pundits' version of the Iran-Iraq war.

With a few notable exceptions (John McCain, Rudy Giuliani), Imus's favorite interlocutors were a Who's Who of the Washington and New York liberal establishment: Evan Thomas, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Tom Friedman, Frank Rich, Paul Begala, Howard Fineman, Tom Oliphant, Bob Schieffer, Jon Meacham, et al. Indeed, Oliphant--no one's idea of a man you'd take with you to a knife fight--had the misfortune, as Lowry put it, "to appear on Imus's show after the 'nappy-headed' comment and before it was clear that Imus was on his way to being expelled from polite company." So he made a great show of excusing Imus. But to be fair, Oliphant's parting remark might have been uttered by any of Imus's famous guests: "Solidarity forever, pal!" Or, until Al Sharpton says otherwise--whichever comes first.

Our normal instinct would have been to side with a man in Imus's position simply on the grounds that Sharpton led the charge against him. A slanderer and a race-baiter who has unrepentantly fomented deadly racial violence in New York on more than one occasion in the past 20 years, Sharpton doesn't have the moral standing of a cockroach to judge someone else's public discourse.