excellent op-ed written by a friend on the Palin-Letterman issue

[Nicole Lambeth]

He e-mailed this out last night, and I had to share. He makes some excellent points.



The week Dave lost his backbone



I've been a Letterman fan since even before his NBC show--through the guest appearances on Carson, his brief attempt at a morning show--and I doubt there's a single episode of his late-night shows that I ever missed until the past couple of years. What I didn't get on first run I got on rerun. Or I taped it. I was no older than about 18 or 19 when I was first aware of who he was. Now I'm almost an old person, or at least 19-year-olds think I am, and up until this week I was still watching him.



So when I say I'm a long-time fan, I mean comprehensively long-time, from the beginning of his national career until now. Which explains in part why seeing Dave tumble from this height makes me as sick as it does. I mean sick, physically, in the pit of my stomach. Really sick.



What explains it more is the fact that his undeserved apology went to a calculating, manipulative woman who put her own family in front of the cameras over and over again when she wanted to get elected, knowing her single teenage daughter was pregnant, and knowing the Republican Party was going to have to find a way to shift its sexual standard to accommodate her--all with her daughter in the middle of the spotlight, and with her daughter's "kick-ass" boyfriend having to play the responsible little redneck American role, at least as long as the campaign was going on.



And it wasn't just Bristol, either. Palin brought all her children to the camera. Should I remind you here that the woman started out in broadcast media? You think she didn't know the game? You think she wouldn't know what she was letting her kids in for?



So now, after innumerable jokes about the same subject from various other prominent sources--Jay Leno and Saturday Night Live are two notable examples, certainly not the only ones (in fact, SNL actually made jokes that insinuated incest in the Palin family, but heck, she was having fun doing her actress-clown thing on the actual show, so...well, you know)--after all that, she decides this time around, she's really pissed. Maybe she just hadn't had enough camera time in the last couple of weeks, or something. What other explanation do you have? I've been trying to come up with one. Certainly worse has been said about her. Certainly far, far worse has been said about people on the other side of the political aisle by people who are Palin fans. But for some reason, the timing and occasion were right.



And boy, Palin saw leverage. She saw ad dollars going away, and knew Dave would cave. If so, she was right.



Further sickening are Palin's grandstanding and demagoguery. She was either too stupid or too much a liar not to recognize that Letterman was talking about her of-age daughter, not the 14-year-old. So is Fox News, for not pointing it out--for going with the Palin Truth, because it was time to get righteously indignant about some other fiction, I guess. But we're used to that.



So where's her apology for getting it wrong? Where's any scintilla of recognition from her that it might have been all a big misunderstanding? Where's the "sorry" for implying that Dave was some kind of pervert that a decent woman and her family should stay away from, when he invited her to his show?



No, sir. It ain't happening. Not when she's got the guy on the floor, with her spiked heel in his throat.



As for Palin's noble purpose, standing up for all young women everywhere, or whatever, you may remember that Palin's pick for attorney general was the righteous guy who said, "If a guy can't rape his wife, who's he gonna rape?" And you may also remember that Alaska is the state where sexual assault victims have to pay for their own rape kits. So it's kind of hilarious when Palin talks about striking a blow for all young women, or whatever other bullcrap she's vomiting up today.



This is all theater, all for Fox News and the wingnut radio guys, and Letterman caved because ad money was being pulled.



Letterman should have told her to go to hell. He should've called her on her hypocrisy and stood up to her.



But he didn't, and so Republicans have proven their point yet again: If you want the country defended, don't you want the party where even the women are tougher than a male mogul who's not from that circle? Or do you want the side that caves in and apologizes for sensitivity's sake?



Last week, it was only Palin who made me sick. Now it's an old friend, as well.







And while we're at it...



I've asked this before, and I'd love for some of you to take it up: Why is this ranting idiot Palin supposed to matter, anyway?



I mean, everybody was just gaga over her during the campaign. What a sensation she was, everybody said. But last time I checked, she was second banana on a ticket that got the crap kicked out of them in the presidential election. She's a divisive figure that almost certainly has been part of a wave--maybe even the leader of it--that has shrunk, not expanded, the Republican Party. She's at or near the forefront of a party that is disintegrating, and it's disintegrating precisely because of choosing lead characters like her, who are liked and respected and followed only by the people who were going to vote Republican anyway, and not even all of them.



Wait, I'm not done yet. She's notably ignorant. She's a laughable, despicable hypocrite in so many ways I can't even go through them all here, but we'll start with the fact that she broadcasts the "government is evil" and "too much federal spending" mantras for her party while the state she runs takes more federal money per capita than any state in the nation. She ran Wasilla into a ditch, financially, in a microcosm of exactly how Reaganism ran the nation into a ditch over the past three decades: pretend you can have something for nothing, spend lots of money on stuff people like and that makes them feel good, don't pay for it, and then get out before anybody figures it out, leaving them with the bill.



So why does she still get coverage? All I can figure is, she's the perfect "candidate" for the age of reality TV. She's a celeb, pure and simple.



There are two good reasons why she shouldn't have to have any substance. First, she's a Limbaugh Republican, and those people are not only proud of their ignorance, they don't believe in being governed in the first place. (Kind of like putting an atheist in charge of your church, watching the church fall apart, and then saying, "See, I told you there wasn't a God.") And second, she's a star, a reality-show celebrity in an age where image, not real competence and substance, is what matters. If that weren't the case, the nation would have elected a true war hero in 2004 instead of half the nation calling him a traitor, and it would have rejected the fake "hero" who dodged even his Guard service and put on a military flight suit as a costume.


In that sense, Palin's just the right person at just the right time, isn't she? Celeb-wise, I mean. But other than celebrity value, why exactly are we supposed to care what Palin does or says?

--30--

--Stephen Finley, 16 June 09

[Nicole Lambeth]

1. kick

just so more people can read it...

[Ilsa]

2. I think Letterman wants this to go away so she can't use him for

continued fundraising. He's gotten some mileage from it, but it is time for it to end.