Queen of Clubs: Frank Rich

New York Times columnist Frank Rich earned the nickname "the Butcher of Broadway" for his brutal theater reviews.  In more recent years, he's built a career out of butchering the President.

But Rich, a regular Imus guest since the early 1990s, wasn't so quick to bring out his knife when it came to defending Imus.

As the Rutgers firestorm threatened Imus' job, Rich was asked if he would ever do Imus' show again.  "I may.  I'm not ruling it out." Rich said.  "I'll have to wait and see how it plays out."

Rich was one of the Imus regulars who said very little during the Imus controversy.  While the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world trashed Imus, Rich was silent.   

Rich waited until the weekend to speak up.  In an April 15th column titled "Everybody Hates Don Imus,"  Rich took aim at some of the hypocrisy surrounding the Imus story, pointing out Sharpton's mistakes of the past, including his involvement in the Tawana Brawley case.  Rich also made a point of saying he didn't view Imus as a bigot.

But the column in the Sunday paper was three days too late.  Imus was already back at the ranch after being fired a few days earlier.  The tough-talking columnist, willing to take out people from Broadway to Pennsylvania Avenue, couldn't find the courage to speak up until after Imus' fate had been sealed.

If Rich ever had a problem with Imus' brand of humor during all those years of appearing on the program, he never let it show.  In fact, in January 2003 he told Imus he hoped to model his new column in the Times' arts and leisure section after Imus:

Listen to the entire 2003 interview and others with Rich in the media player on the right.

Queen of Hearts: Ana Marie Cox

While most of the people who appear on our deck of cards get there because of their silence, Time Magazine's Ana Marie Cox makes the list for falling all over herself to sell Imus out as soon as she had the chance.

Once Cox sensed the tide was turning against Imus, she hammered him in a column in Time Magazine.  Cox wrote that she “succumbed” to the boy’s club “potty-mouth” talk when going on Imus.

Cox's column did not mention that long before Imus ever put her on the air, her blog The Wonkette was far trashier than anything ever said on Imus. 

In 2004 she wrote, “OK, we were basically kidding about Bush being gay.  Sure, he likes to play dress-up and hug shut-ins and he seems to have a daddy fixation, but we didn’t believe he had actually f--ked anyone in the ass.”

The website Check Your Facts has done a nice job of outlining Cox's hypocrisy.  To read their article, CLICK HERE.   

Here's Cox's January 20th, 2005 appearance on Imus' show, one of the many times she "succumbed" and lowered herself to Imus' level.  There will be more to come, including the time she was on and volunteered what she knew about photographs of Jenna Bush's private parts.

Imus' Deck of Cards: Jonathan Alter

As the rumor mill heats up that the old cowboy is returning to the radio, we want to make sure he's ready with plenty of show-prep.  So in the style of Iraq's most wanted, we're helping him keep track of the weasels and dirtbags who sold him out or left him out to dry, with his very own house of cards.

First up is the king of spades, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.  Alter was a regular on Imus' show, appearing almost weekly to hump his magazine.  Alter and the boys at Newsweek came crawling to Imus when they nearly started a holy war in the middle east with a false story on U.S. soldiers flushing Qurans down a toilet at Gitmo.  Imus gave them all countless airtime to make good on their mistake.

When Imus got in trouble this past spring, Jonathan was nowhere to be found.  When the Los Angeles Times tried to contact him for comment on the Imus matter, Jonathan went into hiding.  Alter's editor spoke for him, when he issued a statement saying Newsweek's authors would no longer appear on Imus' program.

We found another example of Alter's phoniness in the archives from March 7, 2005.  That's when Dan Rather was on his way out at CBS, and several of CBS' old-timers sold HIM out in an article in the New Yorker.  Alter went on Imus' show to talk about how despicable it was for people like Andy Rooney and Mike Wallace to kick Rather when he was down.

Too bad Alter couldn't show his own "courage."  Take a listen: