Friends are now reminding me that ESPN fired Rush Limbaugh as a football analyst over a racial comment a few years back — I had intended to mention this in my post on Irvin but plain forgot. Except as an illustration of double standards, however, I don’t think it much matters. Canning Irvin as a kind of retribution for Rush strikes me as inappropriate. Irvin’s behavior should be judged on its own merits: He said something dumb and quickly apologized for it. His apology ought to be accepted. His comment, by the way, was in no way hateful–it was perhaps a case of weirdly misplaced racial pride. Limbaugh’s comments weren’t hateful either. (I do think they were wrong — Donovan McNabb is not an overrated QB.) If conservatives were to adopt firing Irvin as a cause, we’d be no better than Al Sharpton and Howard Dean, who called for the tarring and feathering of Limbaugh. This was a severe overreaction. The same would hold true here.