Vol. 73/No. 25      June 29, 2009

Palin, who was the Republican candidate for vice president in 2008, visited New York recently and went to a Yankees baseball game with her 14-year-old daughter Willow. In Letterman’s comedy routine June 8 he said, “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game during the seventh inning. Her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” The next night he pursued this line, saying the hardest part of the New York trip was “keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”

Letterman also did a “Ten Top Highlights of Sarah Palin’s Trip to New York.” Highlight number two was: “Bought makeup at Bloomingdale’s to update her ‘slutty flight attendant’ look.”

Palin responded in an interview with Matt Lauer on the “Today Show” June 12. “My first thought was, ‘Hey, don’t disparage flight attendants. They work hard—we love them,’” she said.

Palin called the “joke” about her daughter “a degrading comment about a young woman.” To make jokes about “statutory rape,” she said, is “a sad commentary on where we are as a culture, as a society to chuckle and laugh through comments such as he made the other night.”  
 
Double standard
The Alaska governor pointed to the “double standard” followed by the media and Hollywood. “Remember in the campaign,” she noted, “Barack Obama said the family’s off limits… . Everybody adhered to that… . They haven’t done that on the other side of the ticket and it has continued to this day.”

Readers of most liberal newspapers were not even aware of the antiwoman remarks by Letterman until many days afterward. The June 10 New York Times carried a story headlined, “Letterman Reaches a Deal with CBS to Extend ‘Late Show.’” It did not mention the Yankees game “jokes” of the show’s previous two nights. A one-paragraph note in the “Arts, Briefly” column in the June 11 Times—headlined “Letterman Leads Late-Night Ratings”—also ignored the “jokes,” which had been running for three nights now. Other media downplayed the story, too.

Finally, on June 13, the Times printed an Associated Press dispatch reporting the controversy and speculating that Palin’s response “may have inadvertently given Letterman a platform at a time when it is most valuable.”

Letterman responded on the air June 10 to the objections of the Palin family by provocatively retelling each “joke” again to gales of laughter and rounds of applause. He insisted he wasn’t talking about 14-year-old Willow but her 18-year-old sister Bristol, “the girl who actually—excuse me, but—was knocked up is now 18 years old.” He muttered that maybe the Yankee stadium routine was in bad taste, but not the “slutty flight attendant” line. “I kind of like that joke,” he said.

Letterman finally issued an apology for the joke June 15 but continued to say it was “misunderstood.”  
 
‘Where is feminist outrage’?
FOX News host Greta Van Susteren replayed the Letterman shows and asked, “So where is the feminist outrage over this? We called Ms. magazine. They had no comment. We asked the National Organization for Women to send someone to appear on our show. They declined but then added Letterman to its Web site’s ‘Media Hall of Shame.’”

A NOW statement criticizing Letterman was posted to the “Media Hall of Shame” June 11. It ended with an attack on conservatives who have protested the comedian’s remarks. “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,” it said.

One of the very few liberal voices in the media to denounce Letterman is Mika Brzezinski, one of the hosts of the “Morning Joe” talk show. “I wonder if it was the kid of Al Gore or Bill Clinton when he was president, or the Obamas, if that joke would ever be told,” she commented.

Neither Barack nor Michelle Obama has said a word about the Letterman show. Nor has Vice President Joseph Biden, or William or Hillary Clinton. No leading Republican Party figure has spoken out either.

Neither has any liberal capitalist figure or media commented on the anti-working-class character of Letterman’s jokes. At various times since Palin became a national figure, Letterman has quipped that “she looks like the flight attendant who won’t give you a second can of Pepsi… . Like the waitress at the coffee shop who draws a little smiley face on your check. Have a nice day… . She looks like the lady at the bakery who yells out, ‘44! 44! 45!’”
 
 
Related articles:
Letterman’s antiwoman comments
Picketers defend abortion rights in Chicago  
 
 
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