Red on Red: Media Matters called in the artillery on Imus

I'm not at all sorry to see Don Imus go. Not a bit. I'm surprised the thing didn't stop with his apology, but the fact is I think it would have stopped there if he hadn't already built his career on exactly this sort of nastiness.

Much of the righty blogosphere disagrees with me, including Daily Gut's Jim Treacher. Fair enough. But what's cool about this is that Media Matters brought him down. The group that Bill Maher just got through calling a "bunch of sissies" for their contribution to the "gotcha" culture (I've had a run-in with them myself) was the one that obsessively tapes and picks apart pretty much everything written or broadcast for hidden conservative biases--including Imus:

...unknown to Imus, one of his most loyal listeners in Washington, D.C., was watching, and taping, the show every day for just that reason: to make a record of everything Imus said. But 26-year-old Ryan Chiachiere wasn't a fan, and he wasn't tuning in to be entertained. Chiachiere is one of a handful of young activists who spend their days wading through hours of radio and cable shows for Media Matters for America, a liberal group whose sole purpose is rooting out and "correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." Wired on coffee, Chiachiere was watching a recording of Imus's show when he noticed the "hos" remark.

It was a big hit at the group's morning meeting.

The loss of Imus, you might remember, was mourned by the Democrats as the only successful halfway liberal talk-radio presence out there:

...over the years, Democrats such as [Harold] Ford came to count on Imus for the kind of sympathetic treatment that Republicans got from Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

Equally important, Imus gave Democrats a pipeline to a crucial voting bloc that was perennially hard for them to reach: politically independent white men.

Treach, btw, posts Chiachere's picture...

...and I think I've seen that face somewhere before, again helping out the Democrats in a super-helpful way:

Rove's gender-bending agent X strikes again!