It is not so hard out here for the race hustler pimps

Kathleen Parker:

n my eyes I done seen some crazy thangs in the streets
Gotta couple hos workin' on the changes for me ...

-- Lyrics from "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp,'' 2006 winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Song, by Al Kapone for "Hustle and Flow.''

The air is so thick with irony and hypocrisy these days, it's hard to find oxygen to breathe.

On the same day that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper declared the three white Duke University lacrosse team players innocent of the alleged rape of an African-American stripper, MSNBC canceled its simulcast of the Don Imus radio show for a racial slur against the mostly black Rutgers University women's basketball team.

Two athletic teams -- one mostly white male, one mostly black female. Two examples of race and gender colliding. One rogue prosecutor; one rude shock jock.

Obviously, there's no comparison between the two cases in terms of consequences. While the Rutgers gals suffered hurt feelings, Imus lost his television gig and his radio show, the three Duke men potentially faced 30 years in prison and District Attorney Mike Nifong faces ethics charges.

But the two episodes do share the complicating and distorting factors of race, sex and politics.

And of course, they both share the opportunistic involvement of those two rogue race-baiting reverends, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Both not only came to the aid of the Rutgers basketball team, but grabbed the microphones before the accused Duke players had their day in court.

In Imus' case, neither was willing to accept the radio host's apology for his unfunny racist remark aimed at the basketball players and both worked, successfully, to get him off television airwaves.

In the Duke case, we will succumb to suffocation, I suspect, if we hold our breath waiting for Sharpton and Jackson to apologize for feeding the racist frenzy that condemned those three young men whose lives were nearly ruined by innuendo, lies, an out-of-control prosecutor and a complicit media.

...

Jackson and Sharpton are more deserving of the treatment that befell Imus because their conduct was far more egregious and mean spirited. It was also more in the character of a lynch mob. Fortunately they failed in their attempted lynching of the Duke athletes, but their lynching of Imus appears to be a complete success. However, the world and especially black Americans would be better off if the race hustling pimps lost their gig. Their victim gig is holding back too many blacks who buy into it and who can't comprehend that everyone faces adversity and they cannot let race be an excuse for failing to deal with adversity.