Well, just take a stab at it; is there any possible way to spin it so it is about Willow, and has any humor at all?
It doesn’t make sense to me. Why would he attempt a joke about promiscuity and target someone who is barely on the national radar, much less famous for getting knocked up?
I thought you admitted you were not a mind reader…
Dem logic at its finest. Defend Letterman (who clearly wasn’t even referring to Willow) by smearing the 14 year old anyway.
Bristol is fair game, she’s an adult. Willow is a kid. Leave her the fuck alone, asshole.
You really think the joke is funny either way?
Again, if the joke was about Bristol Palin he should’ve mentioned her by name.
And I’m not a mind-reader. I’m not sure why that lack of ability would prevent me from watching Letterman’s half-assed apology the other night. I’m not quite getting your final point here.
I do think the image of Brisket having sex in the dugout, while Palin mugs for the cameras is mildly funny.
Why? There’s only one Palin who is known for getting knocked up.
You claimed you not only knew what Letterman understood about the controversy, but his reasons for back-walking it:
None of that is self-evident, and there are plenty of reasons why he might offer an explanation, most of which are not remorse. I cited pressure from CBS, but that is just a guess, because I am not a mind reader. And neither are you.
Missed the edit window:
I also think that it’s not really this particular joke that has Letterman in trouble right now. It was rather the preponderance of vicious and irrational hatred aimed at Sarah Palin spread out over a couple of days. You know what I mean. The “keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter” comment and the line about the “slutty airline attendant look.”
As for the “knocked up” remark, even Letterman has distanced himself from it, calling it in “bad taste” and admitting that he “probably” regrets saying it. There’s really nothing to defend here, yet you go on as if the joke is some priceless witticism that might have been heard around the Algonquin Round Table or something. I don’t know if you’re a die-hard Letterman fan or a drooling Palin-hater, but, really…you might want to give this one a rest.
And that is why the subtleties of humor are lost on you; you cannot see anything between “priceless witticisms” that are recorded for the ages, and utterly humorless statements with no entertainment value at all. Life for you is black or white, hot or cold, LOL or WTF, nothing in between.
I pity you. Life, with all its infinite hues and shades, must be such a disappointment.
The point is, it’s simply wrong to portray a young girl, whether she’s 14 or 18, as a slut on national television simply because her mother had the timerity to accept an offer to run for vice-president…oh, yeah…and because her mother’s a Republican!
I turned away from Rush Limbaugh for a far less egregious gag than this, and made to a much smaller audience.
The behavior from the left with regard to Palin’s family (and Palin herself; when have you ever heard a major left-wing media figure refer to any leftie female politico as slutty?) has been not only hypocritical but utterly reprehensible.
Still, this situation pleases me. Now the whole country gets a chance to see just how petty, hateful, intolerant and viscious late-night lefties and their audiences really are, and that will only help Palin and conservatism in the long run.
He didn’t have to mention her name, because for practically everyone in this country (except for the true-blue Palinites), Palin’s kids are:[ul][li] Bristol, best known for her foray into premarital sex[/li][li] the DS baby[/li][*] all the rest (3? 4?)[/ul]Making a joke about the daughter no-one knows about or remembers makes no sense. Who cares if she wasn’t at the game? So maybe a hundred Yankee fans will know the error; the rest of the audience will only know that he’s making a sex joke about the only Palin kid that’s a household name. There have been plenty of jokes about Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Gore, etc. that were contradicted by the “facts”, but that didn’t make them any less viable as fodder for jokes (though the humor is always strictly YMMV, especially for the cheap shots, which the Bristol joke admittedly was).
Yeah, this actually explains quite a bit.
Well, there is the part about shilling your children when they are useful, then feigning outrage when they attract unwanted remarks. You can’t have it both ways; Brisket hit the airwaves with her sex life long before Letterman held her up to ridicule. She is fair game.
Well, there you are. I laugh at more things than you do. I’ll bet you are a picky eater too.
This is very likely true, but does it really make her a promiscuous person? Even as the punchline for a joke? And as I’ve said before, I can’t imagine that Letterman, even after his explanation the other night, can be feeling very proud of himself this weekend.
Kinda like when the Clintons were “pimping out” Chelsea during the campaign? David Shuster of MSNBC made that comment and the Clintons predictably “feigned outrage” over it. This was the adult Chelsea, by the way.
I’m not defending the Clintons. Chelsea is a big girl now. She has even said as much. The Schuster remark was way overblown, and in my opinion the Clintons were just exploiting it for political reasons.
No, she isn’t. It’s outrageous to think it’s okay to make an 18-year-old girl the butt of national slut jokes simply because her mother ran for office and made her existence known. (And besides, the press was all over Palin’s family digging for dirt from day one. Palin had no choice but to make her family part of her campaign.)
This is politics, pure and simple, and you guys are looking pretty damn ugly.
This, from the party of Rove and Cheney? 'Tis to laugh!
She is now an adult and a political activist. If she is going to put herself out there as a public advocate for a specific political cause, then she s fair game for criticism and mockery, especially since her stance on said political issue is completely hypocritical.
No, it doesn’t make her promiscuous, but it does make her sexually experienced, and that’s as threadbare a connection as you need. Dan Quayle was an intellectual lightweight, but all it took was misspelling one word to make him slightly short of retarded for the late night comedians. Humor’s about exaggeration, and lazy humor especially so.
Like it or not, Bristol Palin consciously chose to remain a public figure long after the McCain ticket lost last fall. That doesn’t mean the joke was fair or funny, but it also wasn’t an egregious violation of propriety or privacy.
But that hasn’t been the crux of the Palin parents’ complaint anyway. Their outrage is based on the more contrived and inflammatory interpretation of the joke, one virtually nobody made beyond their inner circle but one they continue to browbeat in front of every available camera. They seem vastly more preoccupied with stirring the media shit than to try to distance their younger daughters’ name from this fracas. If I was a 14-year old, I’d be mortified at this type of attention. But I don’t recall Letterman saying Willow’s name once, even in the “apology”. It’s Sarah’s holy crusade against the most pointless of targets on the most flimsy of provocations that’s keeping her identity front and center.
He was merely highlighting the stupidity of those who took offense at it. He did a fine job of it, too!
Since he used it, I think it’s safe to say a highly educated man like himself knows perfectly well that it’s an accepted variant. Why would you think someone who is obsessive in his word choices for any other speech would suddenly decide to use a word or pronunciation he knew nothing about?