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High Priests Of The Church Of The Political Agenda

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Frank Shannon

Published: April 23, 2007

Don't think for an instant that I'm gnashing my teeth and rending my garments over the departure of Don Imus from talk radio. Good riddance. He was irritatingly coarse and crass, a blight on the air waves well before he uttered his demonstration of idiocy against the Rutgers women's basketball team. The only regret I have is that he didn't take smut-mongering shock-jock Howard Stern with him when he went.

No, Imus deserved what he got. My only problem lies with who was holding the door open for Imus and who was kicking him in the butt on the way out. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and give it up for the two hardest working guys in political correctness - Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton!

So as the Imus dragon lies slain, fired by both MSNBC and CBS Radio, in large part due to Jackson and Sharpton pushing the issue. The honor of Rutgers' damsels in distress is avenged.

The honor of some other college athletes was recently avenged as well, but in spite of Jackson and Sharpton rather than thanks to them. In North Carolina, charges were dropped against three Duke University lacrosse players who were accused of raping a stripper. Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong pressed ahead with the case despite weak evidence, grandstanding in an election year to score black votes. The college students were white, the stripper black, and it turned out that Nifong was sweeping exculpatory DNA evidence under the carpet that likely would have cleared the accused. Nifong's efforts weren't helped by the fact that the stripper kept changing her story. Nifong is currently being investigated for prosecutorial misconduct by the North Carolina bar, with possible U.S. Justice Department involvement forthcoming.

The case, of course, stirred up racial tensions which attracted, even more predictably, the participation of Reverends Jackson and Sharpton, neither of whom, interestingly, have ever attended any seminary or school of divinity. The self-appointed civil rights leaders stirred the pot, attacked the three Duke athletes, and fully backed Nifong and the stripper, at least until the case fell apart. Since then, the two high priests of the Church of the Political Agenda have been strangely silent. Imus has made his apologies to the Rutgers women's basketball team, but no apology – or even an expression of regret – has come from Jackson or Sharpton to the Duke lacrosse players.

And this just in from the Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Stone Department, Jackson and Sharpton haven't exactly been innocent of tripping over their own tongues and stupidity. Among his more outrageous remarks, Jackson referred to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York City as "Hymietown" during a 1984 interview. In 2001, it was revealed that Jackson had fathered a daughter during an extramarital affair, and that the mother of the child had been paid money out of funds from Jackson's Rainbow Push Coalition.

Jackson's also made a career as a kind of corporate shakedown artist. Whenever racial issues crop up in a particular industry or business, possibly instigated by Jackson in the first place, he will show up with threats of protests and boycotts, at least until the corporation on the hot seat caves in to his demands or makes a large corporate contribution to the Rainbow Push Coalition.

I've got a Bavarian-born stepfather, a Munich-trained brewmaster who worked for Anheuser-Busch for 34 years, and he remembers well and bitterly the day Jackson showed up to protest Anheuser-Busch by pouring a bottle of beer out on the ground in front of the brewery. Normally not an overly political guy, that little display got the old man's hops and barley boiling.

Sharpton is probably best known for his involvement in the Tawana Brawley case in which a 15-year-old black girl claimed she had been assaulted and raped by six white men, some of them police officers, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., Sharpton and two attorneys supported Brawley. After seven months of examining police and medical records, a grand jury found that the evidence did not support Brawley's story. Sharpton and the attorneys accused the prosecutor of racism and of being one of the perpetrators of the alleged abduction and rape. The three were successfully sued for slander and ordered to pay $345,000 in damages for making defamatory statements about the prosecutor.

So while both Jackson and Sharpton have stuck their feet in their mouths in at least as grand a style as did Imus, nobody ran them out of their jobs, yet they went after Imus' job with a vengeance.

The Rutgers basketball team, with an apology from Imus, will move on. The Duke lacrosse players, without an apology from Jackson or Sharpton, can now get on with their lives after such a long period of uncertainty, after serving as both scapegoats for an agenda and as electoral whipping boys for a corrupt politician.

Imus will likely surface again, perhaps on satellite radio. Jackson and Sharpton, as you might expect, will be coming soon to a political conflict near you just as soon as the next opportunity at self-promotion arises.

Valrico resident Frank Shannon is a longtime conservative activist and writer. He can be contacted at FXShannon@aol.com.

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