A rumor, accurately labeled as one, can still fit in with the Dope’s “Mission Statement.” By stating up front that it was rumor, he dispelled any ignorance we may have had concerning the veracity of the conjecture in the statement.
I agree with this. And when he didn’t hit his 7-second delay button to correct his mistake, he fucked up a second time.
From the St. Louis Post Dispatch
Wrong. The warmongering bitch will claim she “accepts his apology” while using the opportunity to climb up on her high horse about slavery:
Wha? Birth defect? Huh? I think Condi has been hanging out round the depleted uranium stocks for too long. It was a slip of the goddamn tongue!
The manager of the station’s parent company today entered this statement:
I thought it was clever. The birth she’s referring to is that of the nation, with which slavery was entrenched. Thus, “the birth defect of slavery”. Whatever problems you have with Rice, I don’t get what offends you about that statement.
What offends me is that she has taken a perfectly innocuous verbal slip-up and burdened it with racist meaning that simply wasn’t intended. What the hell does a guy tying his tongue in knots have to do with slavery and the birth of the USA?
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner (heh) but I’ll never understand the American preoccupation with race. Isn’t it time to get on with life without constantly obsessing about colo(u)r?
Maybe she was referring to oversensitivity about a word that has a history of being used as a hate-filled put-down? That the scars from the past national tragedy are still easy to dredge up, if not on purpose? I wouldn’t think that a member of the Bush administration would on purpose accuse anyone in America of unconscious racism, so I have to assume she was referring to the entire brouhaha as a sad reminder of America’s legacy rather than just to the actual words uttered by the interviewer.
Colophon, the fact that the word is controversial is evidence of the fact that racial tensions are alive and well here in the US. It’s not just Condoleeza. When someone can slip and use the word “coon” and it causes no more pause than someone saying “badvantage” when they combine “advantage” with “boon”, then we will know that racial tensions are much diminished here. Honestly, I do think the US is moving through issues of race, but it is a process. I am no expert on British history, but my impression certainly is that the UK - or Europe - did not have the same level of slavery as the US, and it does make a difference.
Listeners being too easily offended felt a need to complain. The complaints caused the station managers to fire the DJ. Firing him created a media circus. The media circus re-introduced the word “coon” into the national lexicon. Shame on the listeners for being too easily offended. I sometimes think racial tension is on the upswing because of the responses that an innocent error evokes.
By the way, in case anybody else read the “birth defect” comment thinking it was her response to this incident, it was a quote from a speech she made in July 2003.
I thought that’s what you were getting at, but:
" Wha? Birth defect? Huh? I think Condi has been hanging out round the depleted uranium stocks for too long."
sounds like you’re going in the “she sounds like a nutcase” direction. Besides, what do you think the controversy surrounding the slip-up was about before she added race to it?
BTW, just to be blunt, you are completely missing her point. I’ll help you out with a hint: she’s on YOUR side. Now re-read her apology and see if you can get it.
Well put me down as being “my-zuld” by a very shoddy bit of reporting. Selective quoting, including, as Sampiro points out, an unattibuted snippet of a three-year-old and entirely unrelated speech. The way that article was written, it sounds as though she said that in response to the current situation.
She’s still a warmongering bitch queen, though.
Maybe Condoleeza won’t come out in favor of his being rehired, but the local chapter of the NAACP has.
That’s the local chapter of the NAACP and its newest members – Mr. and Ms. Dave Lenihan.
Hey, what about that public official in DC being forced to resign (at least temporarily) a few years ago for using the word “niggardly” CORRECTLY because some members of the previous administration apparently thought it was a racial slur. (Not that Marion Barry’s administration had any but the brightest, most erudite, scholarly public servants in it…)
Oh yeah! That incident! There was a teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy, smithereen of a chance that we could have ever forgotten, for one moment, the event that will be held up by racism apologists and politcal incorrectness crusaders as proof of a reverse-racism conspiracy decades after the scandal ceases to have any relevance.
…because Heaven forbid someone take a stand and risk hurting the feelings of someone supposedly helping to run a city who displays ignorance of a word most learn in high school or before, and hold him to a standard of competence? Because the truth is not as important as their feelings. What ever happened to the truth shall set you free?
From the further information it seems perfectly reasonable for the disk jockey to have been fired. Not so much for the slip as for the combination of the slip followed by failure to make use of the 7 second delay. Similarly in the current atmosphere of near-censorship it would be appropriate to fire a disk jockey who took a live call in which the word fuck was used and failed to edit it out before the clip was aired.
As of this afternoon,he got his teaching job back.
Ratings Period?
Has this been mentioned yet?
Say the guy was planning on leaving anyway, and the station needed a boost in the ratings, and so he was “prepped” to say what he did.
May not have happened that way, but let me share somthing with you about my early days in radio:
It was during a time when the Atlanta Braves were losing big time (this was before the pennant victories), and I remarked about a play that Bob Horner (then a Brave) really screwed up.
Not meaning to, I called him “Bob Horny”, heard laughter from my engineer and tried to recover by saying, " Of course I meant ‘Horner’, but maybe that is why the Braves are losing!"
Got me in hot water, but it sure caused those phone lines to light up.