What Is Power?

Stephen Metcalf in Slate has a silly piece on Don Imus. Here's the particularly dumb part:

Imus was exploiting a cynical confusion, a common one on the AM dial. In talk radio, the P.C. bogey is kept on life support, the better to allow the heaping of abuse on the marginal and disenfranchised to pass itself off as speaking truth to power.

A few stray words of mockery gets one of the most famous veteran broadcasters fired. Hide behind any excuse you want, Metcalf, that's power. (We can worry about truth another day.)

QueensGuy says: Silly indeed. The most interesting part of this process for me, from a Machiavellian (Rovian? Carvillian?) perspective, was Imus' appearance on Al Sharpton's radio program to apologize -- again. Imus pretty much screwed the pooch when he lost his temper a bit and referred to Sharpton and unspecified others as "you people," a phrase loaded with history. But the bigger question was what the heck he was doing there in the first place. There was precisely zero chance that Sharpton was going to do anything other than what Jesse Jackson did to Michael Richards on his program after the last incident -- i.e. let him hang in the wind, shooting down anything other than an abject mea culpa as a further offense, and even taking the apology under advisement. South Park nailed that one perfectly with the recent"naggers" episode. Say what you will about Mel Gibson, but at least he knows how to hire PR people who can control the message.