I can’t stand Imus and haven’t been able to stand him since I was a kid and he was a lousy rock disc jockey in New York.What’s more, I think his noxious bit about the Rutgers women’s basketball team is certainly grounds for firing on its own merits — a perfect storm of misogyny and racism coupled together. And there’s no sense pretending he’s not a racist and not a misogynist, because he is both things.

Unlike Howard Stern, who’s some sort of monster from the Id and a complete equal-opportunity offender for whom literally nothing is sacred, Imus plays a sophisticated game of acting like he cares about National Purpose — in essence, using mainstream-media celebrities and politicians as a cloak to disguise the misanthropy that’s really at the heart of his appeal.

Satirists should be outrageous. If they’re not, they’re not satirists. Stern is a satirist (and so is Rush Limbaugh). Imus is just a loudmouthed grouch who hates everybody and picks on the worst possible reason to hate whomever he’s hating at that moment.

But as my item poking fun at Ana Marie Cox yesterday indicated, it’s hard to know what to make of certain people who traffic in shamelessness joining in a self-righteous effort to silence someone for saying something appalling. For Al Sharpton, a rampantly infectious venereal disease that masquerades as a man, to lead the charge against anyone for poor behavior ought to be enough to give everyone at least a moment’s pause.

I enjoy Ana Marie Cox’s blogging, especially during the Wonkette years, because she took a pickaxe to the D.C. media’s self-infatuation in a very useful and amusing way. I believe Cox when she says she’s embarrassed that it took her until now to stop playing Imus’s game. But Cox made herself a celebrity by by saying outrageous things — once joking about Jenna Bush “not drinking baby jew blood,” for example. She would not have appreciated being held to a humorless standard that might have interfered with her climbing to her august perch as Washington Editor of Time.com.

There’s no one to rally behind in this entire story except the Rutger’s women’s basketball team.

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