THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 27, 1995 TAG: 9504270465
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
When President Clinton advised us to talk back to talk-show hosts, he started something. Even talk show hosts are talking back to each other in a cannibalistic melee.
At least while they savage themselves there's less time to mangle others. Wednesday on WTAR Radio, Don Imus called G. Gordon Liddy ``a hideously untalented moron psychopathic fool.''
Then Imus termed Rush Limbaugh ``a fat crybaby.''
It's hard to tell whether Imus is liberal or conservative; he closed with a swipe at Clinton.
Just don't get close when he's swinging. Perhaps Imus is just Imus, roaming the spectrum.
Two laughers applaud anything he delivers in his tub-thumping voice, which resonates as if he is hollering down a rain barrel.
In August, Liddy advised listeners to shoot for the head if attacked by federal agents, as they may be wearing flak jackets.
Tuesday he told a news conference people should cooperate if agents come to their homes with search warrants, but they should shoot back if agents shoot their way in.
The head is hard to hit, Liddy said, ``so you shoot twice to the body, center of the mass, and if that does not work, then shoot to the groin area. They cannot move their hips fast enough and you'll probably get a femoral artery and you'll knock them down at any rate.''
Keep in mind that among Liddy's listeners are demented barbarians who bombed a nine-story building and with it scores of precious lives.
``It's disgraceful,'' Imus said of Liddy. ``It's just gratuitous to talk about using pictures of the president and the first lady as target practice. . still in prison; he's lucky he has a job.''
For Liddy to say he had used drawings of the Clintons during target practice is not only gratuitous, nor just rude nor in bad taste. It is incredibly reckless, all the more in bitter times when demented fools abound.
Imus said that Limbaugh can be great, very entertaining, very amusing, but ``he's gutless and he's a crybaby and soon as Rush gets slapped around . . . a little bit, he whines about how unfair it is. Well, shut up, get over it, fatso.
``Do something about it. . . . He'll handle me in the same away he handled going to Vietnam. He'll figure out some way to get out of it.''
It sounds as if Imus is daring Limbaugh to step out in the alley.
And the president's not being much of a help here either, he said. Leave critiques of the media to Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post ``and you run the country,'' Imus told Clinton.
Local hosts hereabouts express views without ranting. Nobody is urging that network hosts be censored. Just that they heed their consciences lest, in shooting off their mouths to raise ratings, they trigger a madman. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
``It's disgraceful,'' Don Imus said of Liddy. ``It's just gratuitous
to talk about using pictures of the president and the first lady as
target practice.''
by CNB