Like the Iran--Iraq war.

IN 1993, Ted Danson appeared at a Friars Club "roast" of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg. In a now infamous, and infamously unfunny, routine, Danson spewed a string of tasteless and racist jokes, peppering every sentence with the N-word. And Danson did this whole monologue in blackface.

Whoopi defended Danson's act by telling everybody to lighten up, it was all in good fun. Heck, she'd helped write Ted's material.

Fast-forward to 2007. Don Imus, as you may have heard, called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" and other racially offensive things. In response, Goldberg said that Imus's comments "pissed me off." "Firing isn't the issue," she explained. "He didn't do anything illegal. Just morally reprehensible." It is unknown whether those in the room ducked for cover lest they be struck dead along with Goldberg by a divine, hypocrisy-punishing lightning bolt.

Of course, Goldberg isn't leading the charge against Don Imus. That honor goes to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Sharpton, you may recall, clawed his way to fame by slandering innocent men and decrying Jewish "interlopers" in Harlem. Jesse Jackson, of "Hymietown" fame, was something of a role model for Sharpton, having made millions by shaking down the rich and famous with charges of racism. Despite an apology tour rivaling Larry Summers's auto-da-fe at Harvard, these jackals will not be sated and are insisting that Imus lose his job and be driven from polite society. I am no expert on Christian theology, but I swear I read somewhere that Christians have a thing about offering forgiveness in response to acts of contrition. But I must have that wrong, since such prominent men of God as Ministers Sharpton and Jackson see no need to stop twisting the hot poker.

We should stipulate that, in a sense, Imus deserves whatever grief he gets. He is a nasty and arrogant man who has never shown much reluctance to take whatever cheap shot would earn him a guffaw from listeners, and particularly from the media glitterati who are now joining in the high-tech lynching of an aging shock-jock. And, frankly, I'll leave it to others to prattle about freedom of expression and all that. The cold breeze generated by any chilling effect that takes Imus off the air for a while won't interrupt my sleep.

But there is a troubling aspect of this brouhaha, as Imus himself has pointed out. He didn't get these jokes out of thin air. Compared with routine fare in black popular culture, Imus's comments look like an NAACP press release. But Sharpton & Co. don't dare mau-mau people who make a career out of calling black women hos. They are about their own self-aggrandizement and the collection of white scalps, and nothing more. If the elite media had any spine whatever, they would stop dancing to the Sharpton/Jackson tune. But that would conflict with the kabuki dance they are scheduled to go through every six months or so to prove their racial sensitivity.

As far as I'm concerned, the only reasonable position is the Kissingerian one. During the 1980s, Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq war, "It's a pity both sides can't lose."