The summary of this is that former VP nominee Gov Sarah Palin was in New York with her family and Letterman couldn’t resist the chance to poke at her a bit in his top ten:

Letterman Top Ten: Palin has a “slutty flight attendant look” 

I bet Ashley Herzog’s bummed he didn’t pull this a day earlier, huh? It would have made a sweet addition to her latest column. The best part: Letterman wondering why Slutty Flight Attendant didn’t stop by the show.

I guess if you can’t make ‘em laugh anymore, you might as well make ‘em wince. You missed your calling as a writer for Playboy, Dave.

Good point actually.  Coming on the heels of the hate f*ck column at Playboy, this is another indication of the lack of respect offered to conservative women.

And exactly why does he make a connection to “flight attendant” and “slutty”?  I have a friend who is an FA and she is hardly slutty, and from recent flights, I cannot recall seeing any that were dressed thus.  I wonder where the FA unions are in this?

Michelle Malkin in her syndicated column notes a pattern:

Face it: David Letterman, late-night entertainer-turned-partisan hack/hitman has a deranged obsession with Sarah Palin and her family that has crossed into rank bigotry and hatred. If the CBS network cares about basic standards of decency on public airwaves and if it cares at all about bolstering its shrinking audience, the network honchos will get Letterman a therapist pronto.

Over the past year, Letterman has displayed his sexist, elitist stripes in jibe after jibe aimed at Palin. Taken cumulatively, Letterman’s mockery is about much more than expressing contempt for the popular GOP governor. It’s a handy device to deride a broad class of working-class and middle-class women he holds in contempt:

“You know, she reminds me, she looks like the flight attendant who won’t give you a second can of Pepsi. No, you’ve had enough. We’re landing. Looks like the waitress at the coffee shop who draws a little smiley face on your check. Have a nice day.”

“She looks like the dip sample lady at Safeway. She looks like the nurse who weighs you and then makes you sit alone in your underwear for 20 minutes. She looks like the Olive Garden hostess who says, ‘I’m sorry, your table isn’t ready yet.” She looks like infomercial lady who says she made $64,000 a month flipping condos.”

“[S]he looks like the lady at the bakery who yells out ‘44! 45!’ She looks like a real estate agent whose picture you see on the bus stop bench. That’s who she looks like. She looks like the lady who has a chain of cupcake stores…”

Now, had it ended there, this would have been typical Dave, as this shows.  He has always made a living being outrageous and he has a fixation on her. 

But sadly, that was actually the second tasteless joke, not the first, and the first one had a slightly different target.

Update: Via Conservatives 4 Palin, a double dip of class. This one’s from the monologue.

When I heard this I got what his point was.  He was making an off handed reference to Bristol, Palin’s daughter who got knocked up during the campaign.  Apparently that is slut behavior, such that she would do it again with a total stranger at a baseball game.  I guess unwed moms are a hot topic for Dave.  So much for liberal sensitivity.

And he followed it up with another the next night:

Here’s what the crack “Late Show” writing staff came up with when, as predicted, he went back and demanded more “sex with Palin’s daughters” jokes. Oh, almost forgot: CBS just signed him to a new deal through 2012. Presumably he’ll have worked his way up to gags about Piper Palin turning tricks by then.

So we are up to slut AND prostitute.  Yeah!

One little problem though:  Bristol was not in New York.  Sarah’s younger daughter Willow was.  And Willow is only 14. 

Maybe he intended his comments to point to Bristol, but since Willow was the only one there, the Palin’s were justifiably ticked:

“Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”

- Todd Palin

“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands - that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contribute to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’”

- Governor Sarah Palin

And just imagine how Willow must have felt if she saw any of this.  Hearing this and knowing she was the only daughter there.

David offered an apology, sort of, claiming as expected that his jokes were meant to be about Bristol:

I have a few problems with this apology. 

• He hammed it up all through the apology.  It lacked true sincerity.   And as the audience laughed, did he admonish them with the seriousness of it?  No.
• He ignored the real issue.  He ignores that the real problem was that he  or his writers didn’t even bother to see if Bristol was there.  He should have just admitted he didn’t bother to check.  So instead by implication the jokes went to Willow whom he wouldn’t even mention by name.
• He never apologized to Willow.
• Even if Bristol was there, why would mocking her, making her into a slut who gets pregnant at a ballgame, and alluding to her being the target of a man who is known to frequent hookers be funny?

He dismissed it as overreaction of  but that is a common cop out, and frankly they were tasteless and partisan.  What made them funny to him was that they were about Sarah Palin, a conservative womans, and fair game to all the chauvinistic comments he could muster.  Would a liberal woman or girl have been a legitimate target like this to him?

Would he have made similar jokes against Amy Carter or Chelsea Clinton? 

Would he have made disparaging comments about Michelle Obama and her makeup?  Or her wardrobe?

No.

Proof of this might be in Kathleen Parker’s blame the victim comments:

Via Gateway Pundit, an uncannily similar reprise of Bonnie Erbe’s shot at Michelle, with Parker in the Erbe role and Palin standing in for MM. Yes indeed, says Parker, Letterman’s “slutty flight attendant” joke was over the line. But that’s what Palin gets for winking at Rich Lowry during her VP debate with Biden or something:

[Question]: Listen, Letterman is a comedian. Comedians that don’t go over the line are not funny. If you said she looks slutty, that’s over the line. If I say it, it’s over the line. Why wouldn’t Letterman say it - have you been on a plane?

Kathleen Parker: I don’t have a problem with raunchy humor, but time and place are everything. In a nightclub, fine. But Letterman is sort of an American institution. It just seems to me that when a woman is running for public office, we should avoid sexualizing her.

Okay, I censored myself before so I’ll say it now. I also think it’s out of line for a woman to sexualize her candidacy, which Palin did. Just ask Rich Lowry, who wrote that he had to sit up a little straighter when she winked during the vp debate. So, maybe when you play the flirt and invite males to see starbursts bouncing off the walls (Lowry again), then maybe you invite the sexual punchline. I’m wobbling here.

So because Sarah Palin had the audacity to wink at a friend, she is asking for it?  Seriously?

This is typical liberal hypocrisy.

And in the same spirit, Olbermann decided to twist this completely and make Palin the victim and Bristol fair game:

Believe it or not, this trainwreck wasn’t even the number one story tonight. That was reserved for Carrie Prejean, with Village Voice troll Michael Musto reprising his role as hatchet man by calling her a “biotch” while fantasizing with Olby about her career melting down. Somehow, some way, Margaret Carlson manages to sink lower than even the modern-day Murrow here, first by spinning Letterman’s non-apology as an apology more profuse than any talk-show host has ever delivered and then arguing that Bristol’s actually fair game for crap like this because she was, after all, a presence at the Republican convention or something. Try and fathom a mind that actually searches for ways to justify goofing on an 18-year-old single mother as a whore.

None of this is a shock really.   It is actually par for the course.

What is, however, a shocking final blow to this is who suddenly rose from a decades long partisan apathy to defend Palin:  NOW

 Oh my: NOW inducts Letterman into its “Media Hall of Shame”

Credit where credit’s due.

Comedians in search of a laugh should really know better than to snicker about men having sex with teenage girls (or young women) less than half their age.

The sexualization of girls and women in the media is reaching new lows these days — it is exploitative and has a negative effect on how all women and girls are perceived and how they view themselves. Letterman also joked about what he called Palin’s “slutty flight attendant look” — yet another example of how the media love to focus on a woman politician’s appearance, especially as it relates to her sexual appeal to men. Someone of Letterman’s stature, who appears on what used to be known as “the Tiffany Network” (CBS), should be above wallowing in the juvenile, sexist mud that other comedians and broadcasters seem to prefer.

On that point, it’s important to note that when Chelsea Clinton was 13 years old she was the target of numerous insults based on her appearance. Rush Limbaugh even referred to her as the “White House dog.” NOW hopes that all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren’t professed conservatives.

NOW correctly noted that even if the jokes had been clearly stated to be about Bristol, they would still be rude and tasteless, as was the joke about Sarah’s appearance.

If you think the final paragraph is a PC backpedal, you are wrong.  There is a huge amount of validity there, as Hot Air also notes:

People on Twitter are grumbling about that last paragraph but (a) given how peeved the sisterhood will be that they’re defending Palin, surely you won’t begrudge NOW some sort of ass-covering knock on conservatives here, and (b) their point is, unfortunately, too often valid, as a scroll through righty blog comments about Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton (at least before 2008) will attest. A compromise, then: The right will join in calling out sexism directed at liberal women when the left stops treating conservative women as “inauthentic” or traitors to their gender because they happen to be pro-life. Deal?

I tend to agree.  Conservatives do not always play by their own standards.  

It is good they finally broke some ranks and stood up on this, but at the same time, they have been silent for political expediency for far too long.

 Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, third world county, Nuke Gingrich, Woman Honor Thyself, Right Voices, and Walls of the City, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.