Lou Dobbs: Illegal Aliens "Stealing" American Jobs Is Bad Unless They're Working For... Well... Uh... Lou Dobbs

If you didn't catch Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" last night, you missed a very interesting piece on how Lou Dobbs, CNN's great white hope hype who blames Mexicans for stealing the three U.S. jobs big fat corporations haven't already moved to India or Bangladesh or political prisons in China, just LOVES using "illegals" to do the dirty work at the horse shows his daughter appears in.

Dobbs was on "Democracy Now" on Tuesday as well, where he spent the entire time deflecting every question asked by hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez (whom he haughtily dismissed as idealogues in a lovely pot calling the kettle black moment) by asking them ridiculous questions like, "How many guests have I had on my program?" and "Why are you calling people we ask to appear on my show guests?" [What does Dobbs call them? Chihuahuas? Pretzels?]

The rest of the time he rolled one of his many chins and dismissed the Southern Poverty Law Center (which I happen to think does some good work in a number of different areas) as hacks while suggesting he - the Great Dobbs - had no idea that the CCC is the modern day name for the KKK, a fact I've known for over a decade.

Lou's just such a shit. Which is brown, btw.

Larry Craig: "It Ain't Easy Bein' Hypocritical"

Oops. What IS it with the "moral" and "family value" Republicans who can't keep their zippers up at the same time they insist anyone else engaging in much less heinous behavior deserve to be struck dead by God AND the American system? There is absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual and by no means is homosexual synonymous with pedophile (most of whom are heterosexual, btw) - unless, of course, you're a gay who insists that other gays deserve to be stoned - but am I the only one who wonders if Craig may have pulled this on one or more unsuspecting males below the age of consent?

From the Buzzflash team:

Well, it looks like Larry "I am Not Gay" Craig -- who has remained a senator despite his initial promise to resign as of September 30 -- has been caught by Idaho's most influential paper, the Idaho Statesman, and left without a stall to stand on, so to speak.

In a December 2nd article, accompanied by graphic audio accounts of gay sexual encounters with Craig, the Idaho Statesman (owned by McClatchy Newspapers) provides the names and stories of four men who appear to undercut Senator Craig's claims that what happened in a Minnesota washroom was due to him being a victim of "profiling."

We're not familiar with older, tall white guys from Idaho being "profiled" a whole lot, and apparently the long-standing rumors about Craig are once again being confirmed. Craig has shunned and ridiculed the Idaho Statesman since it first began exploring Craig's hypocrisy on his sexual preferences (he has been a big anti-gay stalwart). But the newspaper has kept on the beat, so to speak, and documents its article about the post-Minneapolis revelations about Senator Craig with graphic audio clips.

Frank Rich: "Everybody Hates Don Imus"

While I actually can't care about Imus enough to bother to hate him, I think Rich makes some excellent points in Sunday April 15th's Times' OpEd piece:

Familiar as I am with the warp speed of media, I was still taken aback by the velocity of Don Imus’s fall after he uttered an indefensible racist and sexist slur about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Even in that short span, there’s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate, starting with Al Sharpton, 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.

It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube. Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn’t hire a P.R. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. “I dished it out for a long time,” he said on his show last week, “and now it’s my time to take it.”

Among the hypocrites surrounding Imus, I’ll include myself. I’ve been a guest on his show many times since he first invited me in the early 1990s, when I was a theater critic. I’ve almost always considered him among the smarter and more authentic conversationalists I’ve encountered as an interviewee. As a book author, I could always use the publicity.

Of course I was aware of many of his obnoxious comments about minority groups, including my own, Jews. Sometimes he aimed invective at me personally. 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.

I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person, any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the forums to defend themselves.

And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true even before the world met his victims. 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. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that isn’t conveyed by his words alone.

Does that mean he should be silenced? The Rutgers team pointedly never asked for that, and I don’t think the punishment fits the crime. First, as a longtime Imus listener rather than someone who tuned in for the first time last week, I heard not only hate in his wisecrack but also honesty in his repeated vows to learn from it. Second, as a free-speech near-absolutist, I don’t believe that even Mel Gibson, to me an unambiguous anti-Semite, should be deprived of his right to say whatever the hell he wants to say. 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.

Liberals are kidding themselves if they think the Imus firing won’t have a potentially chilling effect on comics who push the line. Let’s not forget that Bill Maher, an Imus defender last week, was dropped by FedEx, Sears, ABC affiliates and eventually ABC itself after he broke the P.C. code of 9/11. Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think the Imus execution won’t impede Ann Coulter’s nasty invective on the public airwaves. As Al Franken pointed out to Larry King on Wednesday night, CNN harbors Glenn Beck, who has insinuated that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, is a terrorist (and who has also declared that “faggot” is nothing more than “a naughty name”). Will Time Warner and its advertisers be called to account? Already in the Imus aftermath, the born-again blogger Tom DeLay has called for the firing of Rosie O’Donnell because of her “hateful” views on Chinese-Americans, conservative Christians and President Bush.

Read the rest at Rozius.