Amid all his apologizing and genuflecting and begging forgiveness from the college girls he insulted, shock jock Don Imus, fired by CBS and MSNBC last week for inappropriate comments on the air, couldn't stop himself from one moment of clarity and self-defense when he called out America's media, as well as critics such as Al Sharpton, for using double standards.

"The hypocrisy is absurd," he said.

I'm not defending Imus for calling members of the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."

Neither, for that matter, is he.

"I said a stupid, idiotic thing that hurt these kids," he said before making a trip to Princeton, N.J., to apologize to those kids in person at almost the same hour CBS was lowering the boom on him.

But I am wondering about the selective sentencing that cost him his job and leaves so many like him standing.

Why is David Letterman still working for CBS? Why is "Saturday Night Live" still on the air? Why does Larry the Cable Guy still have a gig?

And don't even get me started about Howard Stern.

These people, and hundreds more like them, are expert at using the art of the insult. They routinely attack age, weight, sex, race, I.Q. (or lack thereof), political persuasion, profession, religion and place of birth in their schticks.

This was Don Imus' crowd. And he wasn't just one among them. He was head of the class. CBS paid him $10 million a year to be outrageous, offensive and irreverent. You could not pull up a tape of an Imus in the Morning show without finding him insulting someone and saying something inappropriate.

Now he's been fired for the same reason he was hired.

There are lines, of course, and obviously Imus crossed a big one, or two big ones.

With just two words he managed to insult women and African Americans. Outrageous, even by his standards.

And when the Rutgers ballplayers lined up to be counted on nationwide TV, all showered and dressed, more innocent, sympathetic victims could not be found.

Imus might as well have disparaged apple pie, grandmothers and golden retrievers.

He quickly realized his gaffe and went to damage-control.

Too late. It didn't matter that he was in the middle of his annual radiothon to raise money for kids dying with cancer. It didn't matter that he made CBS and MSNBC a reported $15 million in profit every year. It didn't matter that big-name journalists, authors and politicians from both major parties, from Joe Biden to John McCain, had spent the past 20 years clamoring to be on his show.

In the murky, ill-defined, inequitable world of political correctness, he had gone too far. Now everyone was insulting him.

In the end it didn't even matter that basketball players, with their tattoos, their baggy shorts, their game faces and their outrageous hair (gotten a good look at Carmello Anthony lately?), do tend to look like boys and girls from the 'hood.

Knowing he'd finally been eaten by a monster he'd personally helped create, the I-man didn't even go there.

---

Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.