Imus Redux

"I'm not a bad person. I'm a good person, but I said a bad thing. But these young women deserve to know it was not said with malice," he said.

Well....WHEW! That's a relief. Don Imus has joined the long, long queue of those who mysteriously produced bad acts out of a heart that is nothing but sweetness and light. I thought this line sounded familiar, so I did me some diggin' and unearthed a veritable phenomenon of this sort of event.

WHEN BAD THINGS BLURT FROM GOOD PEOPLE

1. "I think I am a good role model" -From the pantiless, crotch-flashing, hard-partying, drunk driver caught on video in a racist rant: Paris Hilton.

2. "And I love him, I think he's a wonderful human being. I think he's a very sincere and deeply religious human being. " - The pope? Billy Graham? No. Newt Gingrich uttered this about the man who said THIS: ""You know, if we had elected this man (segregationist, interracial adulterer, and recovered racist Strom Thurmond) 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today." - Trent Lott. (The FIRST time he said it in 1980.) Lott repeated the quote in 2002 on the occasion of Thurmond's 3,000th birthday: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

3. "I feel like I'm a good kid" - Boozy, multi-rehabbed, cocktail hurling partier extraordinaire Lindsay Lohan.

4. "She's a good woman." - Russell Yates, on his ex-wife, Andrea, who drowned all five of the couple's children, ages 7, 5, 3, 2, and 6 months in the bathtub. She currently shares a cell with Dena Schlosser who, in 2004, murdered her 11 month-old daughter by amputating the baby's arms with a kitchen knife. No joke.

I think we might need a better definition of "good" when it comes to people. Hackin' up babies, flashing your cooch, stumbling into martini fights, and ironing your good Klan sheet should not fall under that definition.

There are no bad people anymore. The last bad person was Jeffrey Dahmer, who, I'm sure, had a neighbor or a mama who insited he was "such a good boy". Or maybe Sadaam Hussein, who, despite all, had people marching in the streets to mourn his demise.

That's bad's news for those of us with a Bad Boy Fetish. Since everybody is a Good Person, regardless of what evil they manifest, those of us with a hankerin' for a hunka bad are left to settle for a nice accountant who will tickle our fancy but won't slap it real hard the way we like.

So it's Good News, Bad News. The Good News is there are no Bad People.

The Bad News is the same.