What Digby said…  See…what you need to paying attention to in the story about Imus…isn’t what Imus did…

As the media elite and various political insiders continue to behave as if they’ve just been hit over the head with a cudgel on this Imus matter, perhaps they should wake up and recognize that there have been people out there noticing the raw hypocrisy among this Imus Elite for years. And this does not just come from the more recent bloviating by scruffy bloggers in their deplorable "efficiency" apartments…

Hey man…don’t fuck with Vinny…

There have always been a handful of columnists and journalists who got it. And no one got it better than the late Lars Erik Nelson:

. . . 

Washington Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) came to the Senate floor with a look of sad concern on his face. He was deeply troubled, he said, at the vulgar, morally repugnant content of the new TV season. "We are lowering the standards of what is acceptable in our society and we are sending a message to our children," he said. He denounced an "acceptance of rude language, foul imagery and gross behavior in the entertainment mainstream."

Then, warning parents who might be watching on C-SPAN to move their little children away from the TV sets, Lieberman cited a few of the outrages: On ABC’s "Wilde Again," a character asks to be called "Daddy’s little whore." Another ABC program showed an upraised middle finger. CBS’ "Bless This House" used the phrase "little hooters" in reference to a girl’s breasts. "Profoundly disturbing," Lieberman intoned. "Sophomoric."

Funny thing: The previous morning, Lieberman had been a guest, as is his regular custom, on the Don Imus radio show on WFAN…

And as it turns out, there were a lot of other self righteous congressional scolds stopping by the Imus show back then.  Democrats and republicans, chasing the vote in Imus’ young white male demographic.  And did our mainstream news media ever bother to point out the hypocrisy of politicians bellyaching about the decay of television entertainment while appearing regularly on one of talk radio’s biggest cesspools?  Oh grow up.

There’s a phrase you hear now and then in political campaigning…Dog Whistle Politics.  It’s the art of using certain words and catch phrases that a specifically targeted audience will hear and respond to, while going over the heads of most of the rest of the audience as a whole.  The republicans, and in particular the Bush team, are masters of the dog whistle.  A good example of it was when Bush said that the Iraq war would "look just like a comma" to future historians.  It raised a lot of hackles that Bush would trivialize a war that had killed so many, wounded so many and was still killing and wounding.  But as Ian Welsh pointed out in The Agonist, it was a dog whistle to his hard core religious right base, recalling the proverb "Never put a period where God has put a comma."

It may be hard to think of Imus as a kind of dog whistle, but bear with me.  The audience that Lieberman and all the others were trying to appeal to when they went on their crusade for TV decency wouldn’t be caught dead tuning into Don Imus cesspool, even out of curiosity.  That kind of thing just disgusts the hell out of them.  So all the voters who would have been nodding their heads approvingly while Lieberman and other politicians were puffing themselves up condemning all the tits and ass on prime time TV, wouldn’t be regular listeners to Imus anyway.  The only people who would have known the extent of their hypocrisy, because they’d seen it with their own two eyes, were the news media talking heads who were also Imus regulars…and they kept their mouths shut too because they had books to sell on his show.  So the politicians get to troll Imus for votes among that hard to reach resentful young white male demographic at the same time they’re trolling for votes among the shocked middle class soccer mom demographic.

And now the lot of them are all looking like they’ve just been caught in a police raid on a whorehouse. 

By all means, Lieberman, Bradley, Dole and the rest should go on Imus. But if they do, spare us the sanctimonious sermons about the vulgarity of modern broadcasting.

They never stopped. in fact three years later Lieberman took to the floor of the Senate and "helped" Bill Clinton by saying to the whole world that he was immoral. All of these moral scolds, but most especially Lieberman, are rank hypocrites.

I do not want to hear another word from these people about civility, rudeness and the decline of the discourse. And I certainly don’t want to hear any more BS about blogging ethics and good manners on the internet from any of them. For more than a decade we had to endure lectures from many of these people about "values" and more recently we’ve had to listen to them call for the smelling salts over the degradation of the public square from the barbaric polloi. Yet throughout they loved to hang around with that overgrown adolescent and let him sell their books for him when he wasn’t cruelly disparaging everything in his sights, including them. If those are the decent values Joe Lieberman has been braying about incessantly for the last decade, he certainly got what what he was looking for.

This has been another edition of What Digby Said…