Thanks for the thread to piggyback onto. I've wanted to post it for a few days but didn't feel like getting flamed for starting another sL-IMUS thread. What comes through in this profile was how he pushes everybody around, deranged on POWER. Capricious, turns on a whim like a Caligula/Nero.
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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/02/imus200602.... Although this is our first day of meeting face-to-face, we have already had our share of skirmishes. Because of his reputation for being a flamethrower of ridicule, I am on my guard. I am also genetically thin-skinned, which means that I represent the ultimate in possibility for Imus. In a previous conversation, on the phone, I told him I didn't appreciate his on-air and off-air mockery of my work as a journalist and author, which commenced once he learned that I wanted to profile him. He responded by calling me a "titty baby." I paused for a split second at the insult. It took me out of my righteous rhythm for a beat, maybe because nobody had ever called me a titty baby before, not even in prep school. "I take my fucking work seriously," I said. "I don't have fucking time to coddle a thin-skinned journalist," he said. "You've got a radio show. I don't," I said. And then, with the kind of chuckle that villains give right before they start up the chain saw, he said, "Just remember that." But like a car doing a U-turn on the interstate at 85 miles an hour, he immediately became conciliatory. "What do you want?" he said.
What I wanted was access. Here in the limo on this Monday at the end of October, I have access. But he still has me off-balance, and I have to assume he likes that as well. Prick. Perverse. Smart. Savvy. Curious. Child-like. Moody. Mercurial. Out of it. Into it. Appealing. Asshole. During the week I spend with the legendary radio host listened to by millions on his nationally syndicated show, Imus in the Morning, my reactions to him swirl round and round in a game of emotional roulette.
After nearly 40 years in radio, he is still making waves. The way he did in the late 60s at an AM radio station in Sacramento when, still developing his persona of flamboyant outrageousness, he called up a local McDonald's posing as the sergeant of something called the International Guard and ordered 1,200 hamburgers for his soldiers, to go. The way he did in the 70s when he took New York by storm on WNBC, and Life magazine called him the "country's most outrageous disc jockey." The way he did in the 80s when he developed twin dependencies on vodka and cocaine and lived in such debauchery that a close friend worried he would have the same tragic demise as John Belushi. The way he did in the early 90s when his radio show moved from shock-jock shtick to substance and began to wield such influence that some political pundits credited him with a pivotal role in guest Bill Clinton's victory in the New York presidential primary. The way he did several years later, in 1996, at the annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner, when he delivered tasteless remarks about President Clinton's alleged extramarital affairs while the president and Hillary sat only a few feet away. The way he did in 2004 when remarks he made on the air caused a prominent physician to sue him for defamation. ....
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