Lettermanic Double Standards

The political landscape is so deeply depressing that I find it hard to muster up any kind of formal response to it. The Federal Government now owns the largest car manufacturer in the world solely so it can prop up a bloated union. The trillion dollar stimulus that was passed to keep unemployment below 8% has helped fuel our current 9.4% unemployment rate. Gas prices climb even as inventories rise. We're going to dismantle private health insurance so medical care can be more costly, lower quality and less plentiful. Obama goes overseas and equates the plight of women in America with the plight of women in countries where they are beaten for uncovering their faces in public. North Korea and Iran are about to explode, nuclearifically speaking. And all this crap comes raining down with Obama enjoying stratospheric approval ratings and a political opposition that's eating itself from the inside out.

Blech. Blech. Blech.

So let's talk about David Letterman's Sarah Palin joke.

I know I'm way late to this party. Letterman has now finally apologized for joking that Sarah Palin's 14-year-old daughter was raped by Alex Rodriguez at a baseball game during the seventh inning stretch. His actual apology was pretty classy, although it was preceded by days of excuses - I meant the eighteen-year-old, not the fourteen-year-old; Palin's overreacting, and who is she to suggest that Letterman is a pedophile? - and a decided lack of sympathy from the media, who tried to turn this into a typical celebrity feud, Letterman v. Palin, as if both sides were equally at fault.

Does anyone else remember Mike Meyers' Wayne's World sketch, where Wayne and Garth went down a list of famous babes, and they got to Chelsea Clinton, who at the time was about the same age as Willow Palin is now? Wayne and Garth put up a picture of Chelsea, who was in the throes of awkward adolescence, and then, after deciding she didn't yet qualify as a true babe, gently labeled her a "babe in waiting."

They were ripped to shreds almost instantly, and they apologized profusely. What's more, the Clintons themselves didn't have to get involved, because the media had their backs. And the joke itself was a whole lot milder than Letterman's whole statutory rape motif.

The double standard here is just staggering. Even after the apology, leftists are unrepentant. Allow me to provide the following quotes from Aint It Cool News that illustrate the lefty conventional wisdom on this matter:

1. Does anyone else think that Sarah Palin spends most of her spare time dressed in a nazi-inspired bondage outfit whipping the s--- out of local Alaskan fishermen??? Cause thats kind of what I picture her doing when shes not attention-whoring to get on T.V.

2. Sarah Palin is a grade-A piece of s---. She richly deserves her status as a national punchline.  [This was from Hercules, a paid staffer on the site.]

3. HERCULES - I'm an Alaskan and I couldn't agree with you more. Palin is a pile of pure s--- trailer trash. 

4. I thought repubs were supposed to be the tough guy cowboy party? Why do you all turn into little b--ches when someone rips one of your sacred cows (emphasis on COW)?

5. The G-D D--N Palins' are f---ing serial opportunists. Would someboody PLEASE rape and kill them all!

6. Hey...you're right! Her name IS WILLOW! Maybe she'll turn out to be a lesbian witch who turns to the dark arts and skins a guy alive! Lets see the republicans put a spin on that!

7. The Palins are morons. They symbolise everything that can go wrong with human beings.

8. EAT S--- AND DIE, REPUBLICANS, you hateful, ignorant wastes of oxygen.

You get the idea.

I'm certainly not arguing that the right wing doesn't have their share of Neanderthals capable of this kind of garbage, but I am saying that they get called on the carpet for their crap instantly and unanimously. Leftist vitriol evidenced in what I've posted here usually goes unanswered and unmentioned. Keep in mind these are things written AFTER Letterman reluctantly apologized. None see the irony in calling Republicans "hateful and ignorant" immediately after telling them to eat s--- and die. 

Something to think about as the world collapses around you.