The Chris Moeller Archives

Letterman vs. Palin

New competition is bringing out the best in the Late Night King, David Letterman. After back-to-back home runs Monday and Tuesday with Howard Stern and Julia Roberts, the highlight of Wednesday's show was Letterman answering the attacks on his character by Sarah and Todd Palin in an extended 8 minute segment.

Watch and enjoy.

People misunderstand what makes a great late night talk show host. We hear statements like (This guy's) the best comedian or (This guy's) the best standup or (The other guy) has the best monologue, but Dave is the best "broadcaster" of his group. Unfortunately, that word is so broad and in many ways so ambiguous that most viewers and even critics leave it alone. The great broadcaster though is the one that simply communicates his message the best on television and/or radio. Howard Stern, for example, hosts a comedy show. He's not a studied standup comedian (like Leno) or a pedigreed comedy writer (like Conan or Colbert), yet he's a phenomenal broadcaster. He talks on the air and you can't stop listening to him. Tom Snyder was a great broadcaster. Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa are both great broadcasters. Oprah, too. They're just as entertaining to watch when they're telling you what they did over the weekend as when they're reciting jokes.

This is the element that lifts David Letterman above his television peers. Monologue jokes and comedy segments hit or miss, but when a pair of planes plow into the World Trade Center in New York City, Dave sets the tone for the way his competitors will handle the tragedy, and they wait for him to lead the way. And he was at his best again last night.

The Palins have taken on the wrong guy here in their attempt to keep themselves in the middle of the national spotlight. I fear they've already begun making things worse for themselves. The political grandstanding is more disgusting than ever. At every stop of the family's public courtship with the American people, it has been the family, and not the media, that first raised the issue of the Palin children. Daughter Bristol, then-17-years-old, was thrust by her mother into the glare because of the girl's "decision" not to abort her out-of-wedlock child. Bristol has appeared on every news show imaginable since, promoting first-- through an apparent slip of the tongue-- her belief in the reality of teens having sex, and then, with better coaching, her belief in abstinence-only sex education.

Her mother helped transform Bristol into the face of the pro-life movement in the United States. The Palin brood probably owe half of their fame to the issue of premarital sex. The governor and her doofus husband immediately used the occasion of this recent alleged assault on their children's honor to raise money at their "Team Sarah" campaign website. Indeed, their public reaction to Letterman's off-color gags is just the couple's latest orchestrated attempt to cash in on their children.

Much of the public record already demonstrates adequately and in grand detail that Governor Palin is an imbecile, but I think she'll become even less popular thanks to her ridiculous remarks this week. Aside from even the tone-deaf strategic reaction to Letterman's jokes, didn't she learn from her running mate already last year that the "Road to the White House" really does go through that guest chair resting next to Dave's desk, just as the television legend so frequently proclaimed?

The whole issue is so fabricated, the implication of Letterman's pedophilia so bizarre, Palin's sense of humor so feeble, and her political opportunism so shameless, that it's hardly even worth blogging about. But you know how I get.

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Speaking of tone-deaf, the National Organization for Women (yes, it still exists) has completely fallen for Palin's professionally-coordinated effort to poll better with women, adding Letterman's name Wednesday to its online "Media Hall of Shame." The political group was miffed over the joke in the Top 10 List about the governor's "slutty flight attendant" sense of fashion. It's a characteristic move by the shrill and humorless bunch that has labeled Maureen Dowd and Keith Olbermann misogynist, but stuck by Bill Clinton and his trousers through the thick and thick of numerous sexual harassment accusations and a rape charge.

Message to NOW: Jokes objectifying a female politician who was a beauty pageant contestant and who poses for pictures like this are fair game. Women should not be treated as super-men in the same way that blacks should not be treated like super-whites. Nobody in the public arena is immune from satire. Sarah Palin can be the butt of a joke based on her appearance because she's unqualified to serve in the public offices she seeks and because she was chosen as a finalist for one position exactly because of her appearance. Bristol Palin can be the butt of a joke about promiscuity because her mother made her a public figure and she got knocked up.

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Down the road a piece in Kansas City, newspaper sports columnist Jason Whitlock, an African-American, reports being hassled during a night on the town in KC's trendy Power & Light District. His troubles beg the question of why public dress codes even exist. When they're written so loosely as to differentiate between "baggy" clothes and "excessively baggy," what could be the possible motivation other than to exclude black and brown people? A better policy would be to impose limits on people's actual behavior, and come to grips with the fact that clothes are inanimate objects, incapable of causing problems in a eating and/or drinking establishment unless one's baggy shirtsleeve catches fire brushing past a candle, and even in that situation, it's not really fair to blame the shirt.

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Here's more proof that baseball fans don't care about steroids: the Alex Rodriguez book is now ranked 2,904 in sales on Amazon.com. Only 16,000 of 150,000 printed have sold thus far (after about a month), 11,000 of those in the first week.

posted by CM @ 8:59 PM