In case you haven’t noticed, Al Sharpton has become legitimate. No seriously. Hell has finally frozen over in spite of global warming. Now I wasn’t shocked to see liberals like Barack Obama and the other Democrats running for president meet with him, but Sean Hannity? The mind-numbing event was a scheduled debate over the Imus affair at a confab sponsored by the Reverend Sharpton’s National Action Network. As far as I know, Rev. Sharpton has not apologized for his irresponsible demagoguery that led to the deaths in Harlem and Crown Heights, nor has he ever admitted that the Tawana Brawley affair was a hoax, so why is he suddenly being taken seriously? Well, he got Imus fired.

No one has ever accused Rev. Sharpton of being dumb, and he’s a master of manipulating the press, so journalists rarely demand an explanation for his past transgressions. Mr. Hannity did attempt to corner Rev. Sharpton about the Brawley affair, but Rev. Sharpton simply avoiding answering most of his questions. By doing so he gave his supporters in the crowd the impression that he was being statesmanlike in the presence of a bully.

Now Rev. Sharpton has announced a campaign attacking the entertainment industry that has been profiting from the filthy lyrics heard in hip-hop music. When Don Imus was fired for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team the same denigrating names heard in this type of music, Rev. Sharpton seized on this opportunity to appear fair and balanced by going after the music industry, and now people are paying attention to him.

What I can’t understand is why Rev. Sharpton gets the attention when there are blacks who have been decrying this misogynistic, demeaning form of entertainment for years yet barely garner any attention. Columnist Stanley Crouch is one, and Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, is another. While hardly conservative, Mr. Crouch has blasted hip-hop music as “neo-Sambo” and rails against the producers and artists who peddle the same “bullying, hedonistic buffoons” that D.W. Griffith portrayed in “Birth of a Nation.”

Niger Innis took it further on an MSNBC show on April 17. He said that Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, started the network so that blacks could have their own network. Mr. Innis lamented that Mr. Johnson “has used BET as a vehicle for injecting this filth that is proliferating the airwaves and changing our culture” and said that Mr. Imus was borrowing a phrase that is used every night on MTV and BET.

Mr. Innis is certainly right about how the culture has changed for the worse. My friend’s son recently came back from Florida, where he went to a club where a rapper star made an appearance and commented how the women threw themselves at the celebrity and offered him whatever services he desired. Ordinary women are acting disgracefully like the “hos” in hip-hop lyrics.

I sat next to a young black woman on a cross-town bus who was dressed in an outfit that left little to the imagination. She looked barely out of her teens. She was with a friend and jumped up suddenly and pointed out the window at a man passing by whom she was certain was a rapper in town for a concert. She giddily told her friend she wanted to get off the bus so she could chase him down, and I cannot repeat the rest of the conversation.

If you ask young women in the inner-city high schools what they want to be, they’ll eschew the ordinary professions for a chance at starring in a hip-hop video. Have you seen one of these? The rapper has all his clothes on, but the women gyrating around him have misplaced all of theirs.

I’m really curious about how Rev. Sharpton intends to pursuade the purveyors of this perverted genre to alter a product that has netted them billions. After all, it’s really not about music. There are plenty of decent hip-hop musicians who have been told that the industry just isn’t interested in anything other than the rawest element because that’s what sells.

I’m sure there are those who believe that Rev. Sharpton is being sincere about his commitment to address the racist, misogynist, hateful language that is flourishing on broadcasts and destroying our culture. I’m just not one of them.

But what do I know? I truly believed the Yankees were too smart to ever bring back Roger Clemens.