Juan's Wild Hair

The Imus incident offers a look into which way NPR leans. It would be possible to look at the coarsening effect of popular rap music on the culture and language--fair enough; God knows there's a lot of racist, misogynist lyrics in rap. Steve Inskeep and Juan Williams cover that angle this morning. Hey, but what about the angle that looks at the vulgar, rightist, misogynist garbage popular in the media? Williams and Inskeep don't go near that.

A fascinating aspect of this morning's piece and last Tuesday mornings similar "analysis" between Inskeep and Williams is the obsession with attacking Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Again, Sharpton and Jackson have their shortcomings, but here is the Inskeep-Williams interchange from Tuesday:

(Inskeep) - "Juan, I have to ask you, you published a book last year that criticized protest tactics of people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who are now leading the protest against Don Imus. Now, without minimizing what Imus said, is there any danger that there’s some overkill here?"
(Williams) - "Well there’s danger there could be a backlash, I mean what you see is that people, I mean lots of people, Steve, in our position, sort of in the media...what they’re saying is maybe this is a little bit of overkill, so they’re going to get caught, potentially a backlash from doing too much and from the idea that he has to go on Al Sharpton’s show, that Jesse Jackson is leading the protest. It looks like the same old dance..."

And then today Williams lays into Sharpton and Jackson: "...many of the rappers have been given a free pass by the same people who would, you know, criticize and condemn the Don Imuses...but it seems to me that the Al Sharptons, the Jesse Jacksons have allowed that kind of dehumanizing, wrong-headed language to go out in rap music..."

Well, well, well...Williams is sounding A LOT like rightist Michelle Malkin. The problem with this tact is that Sharpton has taken on the ugliness of rap - even recently (some might question how effectively) - and one of the earlier crusaders against gross rap was C. Delores Tucker a member of Jackson's Rainbow PUSH.