Pat Buchanan on Imus: "[T]he court of elite opinion ... pandering to the mob, lynched him"

In an April 13 syndicated column on the controversy surrounding Don Imus' smear of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan wrote: "Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion -- and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree." Buchanan's column was published two days after MSNBC announced that it would no longer simulcast Imus' show, and one day after CBS Radio announced it was dropping the show.

Buchanan also wrote: "And lest we forget, these are athletes in their prime, the same age as young women in Iraq. They are not 5-year-old girls, and they are capable of brushing off an ignorant comment by a talk-show host who does not know them, or anything about them." He then added: "Who, after all, believed the slur was true? No one."

From Buchanan's April 13 column, headlined "The Imus lynch party":

In the end, it was not about Imus. It was about us.

Are we really a better country because, after he was publicly whipped for 10 days as the worst kind of racist, with whom no decent person could associate, he was thrown off the air?

Cards on the table.

This writer works for MSNBC, has been on the Imus show scores of times, watches Imus every morning, and likes the show, the music and the guys: the I-Man, Bernie, Charles and Tom Bowman.

[...]

And when Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "tattooed ... nappy-headed hos," he went over the top. The women deserved an apology. There was no cause, no call to use those terms. As Ann Coulter said, they were not fair game.

But Imus did apologize, again and again and again.

And lest we forget, these are athletes in their prime, the same age as young women in Iraq. They are not 5-year-old girls, and they are capable of brushing off an ignorant comment by a talk-show host who does not know them, or anything about them.

Who, after all, believed the slur was true? No one.

[...]

I did a bad thing, but I am not a bad person, says Imus. Indeed, whoever used his microphone to do more good for more people -- be they the cancer kids of Imus Ranch, the families of Iraq war dead now more justly compensated because of the I-Man or the cause of a cure for autism?

"We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality," said Lord Macaulay. Unfortunately, Macaulay never saw the likes of the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.

Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion -- and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.

—A.I.