Philip Nobile comes off as such a fretful old lady in his latest screed for MobyLives, in which he tries to shame New Yorker editor David Remnick for associating with Don Imus. Unless you're a sworn prude yourself, you're likely to wind up on Imus' side.

No question Imus does on occasion -- okay, every morning -- come off as a bit of a crud; rudeness and unpredictability in the name of raw, unvarnished honesty is part of his raucous appeal. But in his rants against him, in his stuffy insistence that all decent and noble liberal voices refuse to condone such antics, Nobile seems to be playing Margaret Dumont to Imus' Groucho. Nobile is a lover of liberal groupthink, as Village Voice writers -- with the everlasting exception of Nat Hentoff -- tend to be; he wants every voice in the media to join him in one long echoing chorus of disapproval.

Fat chance. If anything he's only helped bolster Imus' bad-boy image, which needs a boost every few years for him to still be relevant. One can imagine Imus reading Nobile and chortling to himself, as he did after pissing off Bill Clinton at a state dinner, "It don't get no better than this."