We don’t know what the current Vegas line is on Don Imus survival as a salaried celebrity, but it wasn’t a good sign when he tried to arrange a meeting with the ostensibly aggrieved Rutgers girls’ basketball team. What could the Nastiest Guy in Radio have said to them that would have brought them around?  The “I’m just a jerk” line might have worked if it were mere misdemeanor sexual crudity that was being apologized for. But a white guy dissing a person of color, or rather, a whole basketball team of color?  That’s a hate-crime felony, and there are no second chances for perpetrators -- especially for a guy like Imus who has made a career out of cultivating enemies.

When NBC announced initially that Imus would be suspended for two weeks, it sounded as though hard business-sense would prevail. You don’t just dump a guy who’s bringing in $8 million a year in advertising revenues. Or so we thought.  Still, NBC must have known that the two-week-suspension trial balloon wasn’t going to fly with the likes of Al Sharpton, even if the girls’ basketball team might in theory have been induced to roll over.  The brass at NBC need only have checked their files under "Jimmy the Greek" and "Al Campanis" to see how things were going to play out.

That $8 million is going to be hard for the network to recoup, since they don’t make shock jocks like they used to.  That is most surely true in an age where political correctness, especially where race is concerned, sometimes adopts the hairy-knuckled demeanor of fascism. Guys like Imus have to be grandfathered in, since it is impossible any more to insult all the people all the time without getting tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail. Unless, that is, you are Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle. Imus should take a page from their playbook and “discover” a person of color in his family tree.