A Letterman apologist named Jason Zengerle at the TNR blog claims logic is not my strong suit since I defended Sarah Palin’s family and thought Letterman’s apology was, well, like most of what he does these days, infantile and cowardly:
I know logic isn’t VDH’s strong suit, but is it really so hard to believe that the joke Letterman was making about a Palin daughter getting “knocked up” was about the Palin daughter who, you know, got knocked up?
Is that supposed to be funny in a Lettermanesque way? Zengerle apparently cannot follow basic logic, so here it goes: The girl at the game with Governor Palin was not 18-year-old Bristol, but 14-year-old Willow. So logically we are to assume that when Letterman refers to Palin and her daughter at a recent baseball game, he means the actual governor and the actual daughter who actually attended it.
The intent of Letterman’s tripartite sexual reference was to suggest that the Palins were synonymous with female promiscuity. (cf. Letterman’s further references to the governor’s “slutty” look, and remarks about former governor Eliot Spitzer’s interest in a Palin daughter, e.g., the ”toughest part” of Palin’s visit ”was keeping former New York governor Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”)
Cf. that logic: (a) Palin is in N.Y. with her 14-year-old daughter; (b) former N.Y. governor Spitzer was caught visiting a young prostitute. Ergo . . . (c) Sarah Palin will naturally have to “keep” a randy Spitzer away from a likewise randy 14-year-old with dug-out propensities.
Zengerle then finishes with “P.S. VDH says Letterman would never make jokes about the offspring of the Obamas, Kerrys, Bidens, or Gores. Not true.” (He then references a Letterman pun to a speeding ticket by the Gore son. Some moral equivalence that — a pun on speeding versus a pun on the statutory rape of a 14-year-old.)
First, Zengerle cannot read. I did not write that Letterman does not generically attack others; rather that in this particular context he would not have used such grotesque references to the children of iconic liberals: “But the reason he picked the Palins, and not the Obamas, Gores, Bidens, or Kerrys, was precisely because he knew it would not equate to his “last show.”
Letterman would never make a joke about an underage daughter of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, or Al Gore having sex with Alex Rodriguez or Eliot Spitzer. Sorry, he would not. Any idiot knows that.
Letterman offered no apology, but more of his usual postmodern, I’m goofy; feel sorry for me; “got the wrong daughter;” I’m Dave after all junk. The fact remains that in three separate references he slurred the female governor of Alaska and her 14-year-old daughter on a recent visit to his New York. And when he tried to contextualize it, all he did was make it worse by suggesting that he meant instead Governor Palin’s 18-year-old daughter, who recently delivered an out-of-wedlock child.
So follow the additional sick logic there: Having one illegitimate son naturally implies inherent promiscuity of the sort that would send you down to the dugout to have sex with a baseball player or draw in a frequent patron of prostitutes?
Letterman has devolved into a mean-spirited, demented sort. Good luck to his apologists, like Zengerle, who try to explain what he said was not quite what he said. All they accomplish is to end up as foolish and creepy as Letterman himself.