That's Rich

All week, during The Passion of the Imus, pundits have been inserting, late in their comments, the statement "I'm waitning to see what Frank Rich Says". Rich is becoming the provider of all 'Final Words' for those on the left. Frank has also been a regular on the I-man's show.

We got his reflections yesterday and I'm with him (from Raw Story):

"Starting with Al Sharpton," he writes, "who has yet to apologize for his leading role in the Tawana Brawley case, the 1980s racial melee prompted by unproven charges much like those that soiled the Duke lacrosse players."

Rich includes himself among the hypocrites surrounding the Imus affair, noting that he was a frequent guest on the show in the 1990s despite "obnoxious comments about minority groups," including one to which he belongs.

"Sometimes he aimed invective at me personally," writes Rich. "I wasn't seriously bothered by much of it, even when it was unfunny or made me wince, because I saw him as equally offensive to everyone. The show's crudest interludes struck me as burlesque."

However, Rich says, because the targets of Imus' slur were young women who were not public figures other than through being talented athletes, this time the disc jockey's words "landed wrong."

"So while I still don't know whether Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded like hate to me," Rich writes.

But the answer isn't to silence Imus, he says. "The answer to his free speech is more free speech -- mine and yours. Let Bill O'Reilly talk about 'wetbacks' or Rush Limbaugh accuse Michael J. Fox of exaggerating his Parkinson's symptoms, and let the rest of us answer back."

Rich feels that the Imus incident will have a "chilling effect on comics who push the line" and will similarly "impede Ann Coulter's nasty invective on the public airwaves."