You need not be a fan of Los Angeles Clippers owner (for now) Donald Sterling to notice the hypocrisy and selective outrage over his apparent views of non-whites.

Let’s start with former Clippers coach, and former Bucks player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

I used to work for him, back in 2000 when I coached for the Clippers for three months. He was congenial, even inviting me to his daughter’s wedding. Nothing happened or was said to indicate he suffered from IPMS (Irritable Plantation Master Syndrome). Since then, a lot has been revealed about Sterling’s business practices:

• 2006: U.S. Dept. of Justice sued Sterling for housing discrimination. Allegedly, he said, “Black tenants smell and attract vermin.”
• 2009: He reportedly paid $2.73 million in a Justice Dept. suit alleging he discriminated against blacks, Hispanics, and families with children in his rentals. (He also had to pay an additional nearly $5 million in attorneys fees and costs due to his counsel’s “sometimes outrageous conduct.”)
• 2009: Clippers executive (and one of the greatest NBA players in history) sued for employment discrimination based on age and race.

And now the poor guy’s girlfriend (undoubtedly ex-girlfriend now) is on tape cajoling him into revealing his racism. Man, what a winding road she led him down to get all of that out. She was like a sexy nanny playing “pin the fried chicken on the Sambo.” She blindfolded him and spun him around until he was just blathering all sorts of incoherent racist sound bites that had the news media peeing themselves with glee. …

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?

He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?

Shouldn’t we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn’t we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen’s privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney’s comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn’t steal the cake but we’re all gorging ourselves on it.

Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. In our quest for social justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s just another jerk with more money than brains.

Allen West continues:

There can be no debate that the words of Mr. Sterling were reprehensible and disgusting. But how and why did these words come to light now, when his points of view were apparently well-known for many years?

It seems his “girlfriend,” Ms. Stiviano, decided to tape a private conversation between the two. Apparently, Ms. Stiviano had recently been sued by the estranged wife of Mr. Sterling, so there is some potential nefarious motive involved. Furthermore, the taping of a conversation without consent of the other party is illegal under California statute. There is some question as to whether he knew he was being recorded. Let’s assume for the moment he didn’t.

The national outrage against Mr. Sterling has come from an act that could be illegal and inadmissible in a court of law. Nevertheless, the court of public opinion has tried and convicted Mr. Sterling of being a jerk.

But have we come to a point in America where being a jerk is grounds for confiscation of a private property? It was Englishman John Locke who first proposed that individual rights as granted under natural law were life, liberty, and property. It was Thomas Jefferson who in the American Declaration of Independence used that paradigm to propose our unalienable rights from our Creator being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Sterling’s comments were repulsive, but they were stated in the privacy of his own home — at least he thought it was private.

So where do we go from here?

Have we come to the point that private conversations can be taped and released in the public domain in order to ruin the livelihood –pursuit of happiness — of private citizens? Ms. Stiviano, or whomever, knew exactly what they wanted the end result to be as they released this tape to TMZ.

Is this the “new normal?” Is this a violation of our privacy rights? Ok, so what types of conversations occur in the privacy of the NBA locker rooms, or the homes of the players? Yes, this is indeed a slippery slope as Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban asserted. …

Has our culture devolved to the point that the private statements of an NBA owner draws more outrage than the lies and deceit of the President of the United States? …

Sterling is a jerk, an unlikeable fella, but is he guilty of a crime that demands his property be confiscated? Uh, no.

We’re told however that Obama is a likable fella –regardless of the incessant lies, deceit and abject failures. What is happening to American culture and values?

I don’t like jerks, but I really don’t like jerks who are liars, do you?

Herman Cain adds:

It’s become a blood sport in this country to pounce all over people if they say things in the wrong way, and what Sterling said was certainly detestable. But people’s words represent those honest moments when attitudes are exposed for what they really are, and I don’t see how we do ourselves any favors when we demand that people who think ignorant thoughts keep them to themselves. Let’s hear it, and then let’s deal with it. Donald Sterling has been a pretty questionable character for a long time.

By the way, have you noticed that he is catching no heat whatsoever for the fact that he has a girlfriend while he also still has a wife? (A wife who is weirdly quite involved with the running of the team. Interesting family this appears to be.) I guess purveyors of the culture condemn racist words because doing so allows them to appear morally superior, but they don’t condemn adultery because they want to reserve the right to engage in it.

At any rate, I hope you realize that there is really no way forward here that is going to satisfy anyone. If Sterling forced to sell the franchise, he cashes out and walks away with a fortune. If he keeps it but sponsors bail, that mainly hurts the players and others who work for the team – many of whom are black, by the way.

And I don’t know about you, but I am just a wee bit uncomfortable with the idea that we “punish”  people because they say horrendous things. There is no law against saying such things, which is not to say we all have to put up with racist morons. But I believe people who reveal themselves to be ignoramuses tend to pay their own price along the way, and I’d rather see it happen that way than see big official officialdom mete out official “punishments” for things that are awful but are also within people’s constitutional rights to do and say.

Selective moral outrage has unintended consequences, such as what Virginia Postrel points out:

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s foundation pledged $3 million for kidney research at UCLA and made an initial payment of $425,000. In Sterling’s customary self-aggrandizing fashion, he took out ads in the Los Angeles Times touting his own generosity. (Although the ads were written as though they came from UCLA, savvy L.A. Times readers know the distinctively cheesy style of Sterling’s ads, which look the same whether they’re promoting apartments or his latest charity honors.)

Now, not surprisingly, UCLA has decided to return the money. “Mr. Sterling’s divisive and hurtful comments demonstrate that he does not share UCLA’s core values as a public university that fosters diversity, inclusion, and respect,” the university said in a press release.

All perfectly understandable.

But it means that Sterling’s racist comments have now cost researchers precious funding in the fight against a racially biased disease. Blacks are more than three times as likely as whites to develop kidney disease and account for a third of U.S. kidney patients. Outrage won’t help their cause.

The NBA could. The league in a unique position to raise money for and awareness of kidney disease, which suffers from a low public profile and lack of celebrity representatives. It could start by donating Sterling’s $2.5 million fine to the UCLA nephrology program to replace the lost funds. More important, over time, it could give this debilitating and deadly disease the attention it deserves — encouraging screening, raising money for research and promoting kidney donation. It could turn the negative spillovers from Sterling’s disgrace into something good.

This summer presents the perfect opportunity for the NBA to embrace kidney disease as a cause. On August 8, Alonzo Mourningwill be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. NBA fans know him as a defensive great and long-time center for the Miami Heat. He is also one of the country’s most famous kidney transplant recipients. His cousin Jason Cooper, who gave him the kidney, will be with him for the honors. Sports reporters will undoubtedly tell their story again. The league has a chance to add a new chapter.

And prying the Clippers away from Sterling (and his wife, who also owns the team) won’t be easy as some may think. Bob Ford of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

Donald Sterling began his professional life as a personal-injury and divorce lawyer, and he is no stranger to taking on cases that other attorneys would find too distasteful to touch.

He has created just such a case for himself in the matter of Sterling v. World, the upshot of a recorded conversation between Sterling and his multiracial mistress in which the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, a noted employer of blacks, reveals that he’s really not all that fond of such folks.

The story is a lot more complicated than that – any story that also includes an aggrieved wife’s suing the mistress for the $1.8 million in gifts and favors bestowed by the hubby is plenty complicated – but that’s the heart of the tale. Sterling, who has been sort of a dottering dirtbag for years, was gotcha’d by an angry girlfriend and is suffering the consequences as meted out Tuesday by NBA commissioner Adam Silver. …

What we do know, however, is enough to render a judgment on Sterling. What he said was reprehensible – drunk, sober, or entrapped – and can’t be tolerated. Worse yet, it was bad for business.

The NBA studied the situation for two days before Silver walked out and handed down the death sentence. Sterling can’t go to games, practices, or the office. He can’t handle any of the business dealings of the franchise. The commissioner will ask the other owners to kick him out of the club, forcing Sterling, the longest-tenured owner in the NBA, to sell the team and disappear.

It was a harsh sentence, but not a difficult one for Silver to deliver. He was congratulated for strong action, and anybody who thinks he overstepped must be a racist, too. Everyone in the NBA hierarchy, including Dallas owner Mark Cuban, who previously worried about the “slippery slope” of ejecting unpopular owners, fell into line and joined the applause.

That’s fine as far as it goes, and the NBA would hardly miss the presence of Sterling, who has made a lot of money with business practices that grind down the civil rights of minorities, but any expectation that Sterling will take his whupping and leave is overly optimistic. The man is 80 years old, worth nearly $2 billion, is a fantastic egotist, and did we mention he cut his teeth chasing ambulances down the block? Shaming Donald Sterling is not an afternoon’s work.

Sterling has five days to respond to the commissioner. He will certainly find himself in a legal bind, since the NBA constitution virtually forces owners to sign away their litigation rights when judged by their peers to have screwed up the business in a dreadful financial or ethical way. Ted Stepien, briefly the owner of the Cavaliers, was encouraged to sell his team after nearly bankrupting it with terrible personnel decisions and his stated belief that half the roster should be Caucasian to attract fans.

That is an obstacle, but it is unlikely to keep Sterling from fighting back. He knows the commissioner’s actions were at least partially motivated by the bad publicity that caused some team sponsors to flee. He also knows that the league didn’t do anything when he was the subject of a Department of Justice investigation into his systematic unwillingness to rent residential properties to blacks and Latinos. …

Where the NBA is vulnerable – if that is its position on the past – is that Sterling hasn’t been convicted of a crime this time, either, aside from the crime of being a backward cretin. If that were prosecutable, you couldn’t build enough jails in this country. And further, Sterling will argue that the context of what happened was private and had nothing to do with his business or how it is run.

He might not be able to win, but $2 billion will buy a whole lot of billable hours for his legal staff, and this thing and the bad publicity Silver and the NBA want to quash could drag on for years. Will the other NBA owners really stay in line and strip Sterling of a holding worth $700 million if they think he might prevail and then sting them for monstrous damages?

It’s an interesting question, and like the entire matter, there is no precedent to use as a guide. What we know is that this is all about public perception, and that nothing could be of less interest to Donald Sterling. He will fight.