Pat Schroeder on Imus Incident: People Thought Meanness Was Masculine

Has the Imus-inspired national conversation on race and sex jumped the shark? I'm starting to suspect so after hearing Pat Schroeder this morning. Her most notable contribution to the collective dialogue was to suggest that there's something inherently masculine about verbal meanness.

The former Democratic congresswoman from Colorado was a member of a panel moderated by NBC's Lester Holt on this morning's "Today."

View video here.

LESTER HOLT: We keep having a conversation. Are we changing, though, as a culture?

PAT SCHROEDER: I hope we are, and I think part of it is what we're seeing in Iraq. We're seeing in Iraq the Shiites and the Sunnis fighting tremendously and we begin to realize a diverse democracy is a difficult thing to do, and you really can't allow people to stereotype and attack other folks on public airwaves and do things like that. Because that's the kind of, it will breed all sorts of hatred and things that way. It's just not a good thing to do. And so I think maybe we're having a pullback from this meanness. Where we really thought meanness was cute, and somehow it was masculine or something, I don't know, but let's hope there's a real pullback on that."

Bonus points to Pat for managing to work Iraq into the conversation. But really, if we can't do better than this, maybe we just need a pullback from more TV roundtables on the topic.