I don’t know if I’m naive, or insensitive, or sheltered or hateful or go to klan meetings in my sleep, but I cannot believe I am still hearing about this Don Imus thing.

By no means do I mean to say that it was great of him to call college women “nappy-headed hos” because they won some basketball games. It was dickery that the team will get to carry around now.

“We did it ladies! We’re gonna go all the way to the finals! This is our moment!… Who did what? ‘Nappy-headed’? Oh, well, great. Now I get to remember that every time I remember this. Whew, that was a close one; almost had a moment of pure happiness in my life for a second. Print out the transcript; I’ll make room in my scrapbook. Wonderful. Outstanding.”

But here’s the thing: I listen to the audio of the NBC Nightly News as a podcast while I’m at work every morning. I got a couple of days behind, so I started today by listening to Monday’s news and was surprised to hear that Imus was that day’s top story.

“Wow, people are a lot more upset about that two seconds of not-especially-popular radio than I thought. Insulted the hell out of those basketball players, though. So… did we ever win those wars? What ever happened with those?… Top story. Really. Huh.”

So I had my little moment with my headphones, gleaned whatever news I could out of the show before Brian Williams moved on to the daily Boomer-pandering bullshit health story about prostates or whatever and I gave up on him. I clicked ahead to the next day’s edition of the Nightly News.

And Imus was the top story again.

More than the top story, actually. The podcast has no commercials, making it easy to see by checking the little countdown at the bottom of my iPod screen that, of the 20-21 minutes of content that was on the air last night, the Rutgers basketball team talking about how the bad Don Imus man huwt their feewings took up literally half of the goddamn national newscast for the day.

Empirically. 11 of the 21 minutes. They ran the Rutgers press conference, where the coach said, “They are young ladies of class, distinction. They are articulate, they are gifted. They are God’s representatives in every sense of the word” (the center then healed a leper with her tears of outrage) and then after running the coach’s press conference Brian Williams interviewed the coach in case she left anything out of the huge clip he had just played.

This was not the local Action News Team, with their Cover Story on puppy hoarding or fighting flab; these are the people who ostensibly are on the air to tell you, as a nation, everything important that happened today.

As I understand it, the story that merited this level of coverage was “Famous Douchebag Paid to be a Douchebag Every Day Starts Douchebagging It Up Again.” America, sucker-punched! If Howard Stern belches on the air tomorrow, I’m not sure we’ll be able to trust anyone anymore.

Oh, won’t someone please devote an episode of “Dateline” to what Ann Coulter thinks of all this?

At the end of the 11 minutes, before the commercial break, Brian Williams gravely intoned, “We have a lot of ground to cover here as Nightly News continues.” Oh?