This is not the time to be a conservative or a liberal. This is not the time to be a democrat or a republican. This is the time to identify as a comedian. Comedians who are looking to protect free speech.

In the days since Imus was banished from the air, some folks have tried to paint this whole affair as a right vs. left struggle, as a conservative vs. liberal battle. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

It’s getting more absurd with each passing news cycle– The folks who started, and kept, the ball rolling on the Imus dismissal, have tried to propagate the meme that Imus was a “conservative talk show host.” Of course, this is utter nonsense. While it may be true that he called then-President Clinton a “pot-smoking weasel” at the 1996 Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner, Imus said nasty things about folks on both sides of the aisle. As a comedian, he walked straight down the middle. As a non-comedian, however, it’s clear he tilted to the left– Kerry for President, Out of Iraq, etc.

Some have even gone so far as to attribute Imus’ firing to a plot by Karl Rove and George Bush. (We’re not making that up!)

If there was ever a time to resist the temptation to score points for one side or the other, to resist the temptation to shoehorn a high-profile incident into the left/right, liberal/conservative narrative, it is this time. The stakes are higher. Comedians should behave like boxers– look out for the punches coming from the left and the right. Both have the potential to inflict serious damage.

Presidential hopeful (and that is a cruel abuse of the word “hopeful”) Mike Huckabee defended Imus on an Iowa radio show, just after the radio host was finally canned. He said that Imus’ ho statement was “wrong,” “inexcusable” and “over the top.”

Huckabee said that what made the statement so bad “was that it was directed at amateur athletes and college students… and those are classy kids and they’ve shown an extraordinary level of class through this whole thing, more so than anybody else I’ve seen on either side of it.”

Huckabee, though, worries the Imus firing goes down the path of telling people what they can say. “There’s a side of me that gets a little concerned,” Huckabee says. “Where does that stop?”

According to Huckabee, the marketplace should have decided Imus’ fate. If ratings for his show plummeted, then he’d be canceled, Huckabee says. […]

Of course, all the press has seized upon is the preface to the above remarks. Huckabee, when asked if he agreed with the nets’ decision to fire Imus said:

“That was a decision the networks had to make. I think if Imus is going to get fired, then there’s a number of other people who need to go out the door,” Huckabee says. “Rosie’s probably’s got to go. Bill Maher has to go. Gosh, half of television and talk radio has to go.”

Of course, all the media has seized upon is “Rosie and Maher need to go!” Which doesn’t seem to be Huckabee’s point.

There’s an audio clip of his statement. He sounds exasperated, not vindictive. His point in framing it the way he did– If Imus has to go, so does Rosie and Bill– is not to propose a tit for tat exchange, but to ask the question, “Where does that stop?”

Tom Delay, on the other hand, blogged that Rosie should, indeed, be booted off of ABC’s The View.

The response is predictable– Delay is a convenient villain for many. But if you get past the bluster of his blog post, what he’s called for “to use the available media… to protest and demand that Rosie O’Donnell be kicked off The View.”

Some have tried to characterize Delay’s call for Rosie’s head as some sort of a vindictive payback, an anti-gay, anti-democratic attempt to silence a lone, brave voice through underhanded, shadowy maneuvers. But what he suggests are “demonstrations in front of ABC,” boycotting the show’s advertisers and ABC’s parent, Disney, and “holding Barbara Walters accountable for Rosie’s offenses.” Not the stuff of totalitarian nightmares– citizens engaging in boycotts, writing letters to the editor and putting pressure on sponsors and producers are the usual methods that folks in a free society use to voice their displeasure over statements made on the public airwaves.

Compare Delay’s suggested method for bouncing his least favorite talkshow host to the methods used in getting Imus off the air. A videotape of the Imus gaffe is emailed to prominent Beltway figures on Wednesday, April 4. 112 hours later, after a handful of hastily called press conferences, corporate arm-twisting, backroom dealing and media manipulation, Imus’ 30-year career is a smoking hole in the ground. There was no public groundswell of anti-Imus sentiment, no complaints phoned to the FCC, no letter-writing campaigns.

Which method should give us pause? Which should we be comfortable with?

We find it odd that folks are conveniently ignoring the fact that Delay and Huckabee are conservatives and republicans who are defending a talk show host who supported John Kerry for president and who was/is solidly and vocally against the war in Iraq. It is quite clear to anyone who listened to Imus for even a few minutes over the last five years that neither Delay nor Huckabee would agree with Imus on one single thing. Yet the two of them are on record saying that Imus’ career should not have been so ingloriously truncated. That the manner in which he was terminated was less than fair.

They seem to be a little jumpy about the way in which he was taken down and they fear where it all might lead. Like Huckabee said, “Where does that stop?” Even O’Donnell expressed the same fear:

Right, but it’s not a freedom if you outlaw certain words or thoughts, because then the thought police come and then before you know it, everyone’s in Guantanamo Bay without representation.

Of course, she isn’t so much defending Imus as she’s expressing grave fears about her own skin. And, as usual, she did so in her typically hamhanded, over-the-top, Noam Chomsky-meets-Ted Baxter kinda way, but there is one small kernel of truth in there– Where does that stop? On this, Rosie and Huckabee can agree.

So far, the majority of the (few) folks who have mounted any kind of a defense of Imus have been right of center in the ideological spectrum. The folks who were frequent guests on Imus’ show (mostly liberal, Eastern political types and media figures) have miraculously disappeared. They’ve roundly condemned the statement, but they’ve conspicuously failed to defend the man. How much do they fear Jackson, Sharpton, Media Matters, et al? This is what should be troubling to folks from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other. Especially despicable has been the behavior of the MSNBC/NBC cabal, which has been so weasel-like as to make the NBC newsroom look like an episode of Meerkat Manor!

And, of course, it’s been our contention that the ultimate target is comedy. At the very least, comedy will be among the collateral damage. Humor, so the new game plan goes, should be without victims. In the bright future envisioned by the folks who took down Imus, comedy will be sanitized– no cruelty, no bullying, no meanness for the sake of meanness. Certain groups, figures, genders will be off-limits. Satirists will be ordered to lay off some topics. Political correctness will be our salvation, a righteous way to halt the coarsening of society. It will be 1992 all over again. We don’t want that.