From Tuesday's Village Voice:
"New York Anti-Letterman Rally Draws Dozens"

The whole list:

THE "LATE SHOW" TOP TEN
"Things Overheard at the ‘Fire David Letterman’ Rally"

10. “David who?”

9. “Well, it was nice of CBS to provide the catering.”

8. “We should have done this years ago.”

7. “What idiot turned Broadway into a pedestrian mall?”

6. “Isn’t there always a crowd demanding Letterman be fired?”

5. “March around the potholes, people.”

4. “Can we also get CBS to bring back ‘Gunsmoke’?”

3. “When does Cheney get here with the waterboarding gear?”

2. “He should apologize for that hairpiece.”

1. “Thanks for coming, Regis.”

I am – Hercules!!




I’ve been watching David Letterman hosting late-night shows for more than a quarter century, and I’ve not heard him make a lot of jokes about raping 14-year-old children.

But former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her snowmobile-racing husband Todd claim to believe Letterman recently took a break from that “no jokes about raping 14-year-old girls” policy.

Now I heard joke in question, and it sounded to me like it was aimed less at 14-year-old Willow Palin (who to my knowledge has not recently experienced a pre-marital teen pregnancy) and more at 18-year-old daughter Bristol Palin, who took to preaching abstinence to her fellow teens shortly after she gave birth to her now former fiancé’s baby:

Because having consensual sex with an 18-year-old is not considered statutory rape in New York, Todd Palin might have been less inclined to employ the word "rape" had he believed the joke to be about Bristol.

Word is opponents of jokes involving the rape of 14-year-old Willow Palin are protesting outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where “The Late Show With David Letterman" is taped.

Though Letterman explained last week that he thought the joke to be about 18-year-old Bristol, apparently Willow was the only Palin daughter near Alex Rodriguez or his ballpark when the Palins visited Yankee Stadium. As a result, the Palins continue to complain about Dave joking about the rape of their teen.

(You’d think CBS late night exec Vinnie Favale or another network executive might have piped up when Dave started joking about the rape of a 14-year-old girl, but I guess Favale and and his colleagues were unaware that Bristol didn’t make the troublesome trip to New York. Let's hope Favale doesn't lose his job over the snafu.)

Letterman didn’t reference Sarah Palin’s continued discontent on his Friday show, but apparently brings it up again tonight.

CBS forwarded Letterman’s Monday-evening comments to TV Week:

"All right, here - I've been thinking about this situation with Governor Palin and her family now for about a week - it was a week ago tonight, and maybe you know about it, maybe you don't know about it. But there was a joke that I told, and I thought I was telling it about the older daughter being at Yankee Stadium. And it was kind of a coarse joke. There's no getting around it, but I never thought it was anybody other than the older daughter, and before the show, I checked to make sure in fact that she is of legal age, 18. Yeah. But the joke really, in and of itself, can't be defended. The next day, people are outraged. They're angry at me because they said, 'How could you make a lousy joke like that about the 14-year-old girl who was at the ball game?' And I had, honestly, no idea that the 14-year-old girl, I had no idea that anybody was at the ball game except the Governor and I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Giuliani...And I really should have made the joke about Rudy..." (audience applauds) "But I didn't, and now people are getting angry and they're saying, 'Well, how can you say something like that about a 14-year-old girl, and does that make you feel good to make those horrible jokes about a kid who's completely innocent, minding her own business,' and, turns out, she was at the ball game. I had no idea she was there. So she's now at the ball game and people think that I made the joke about her. And, but still, I'm wondering, 'Well, what can I do to help people understand that I would never make a joke like this?' I've never made jokes like this as long as we've been on the air, 30 long years, and you can't really be doing jokes like that. And I understand, of course, why people are upset. I would be upset myself.

"And then I was watching the Jim Lehrer 'Newshour' - this commentator, the columnist Mark Shields, was talking about how I had made this indefensible joke about the 14-year-old girl, and I thought, 'Oh, boy, now I'm beginning to understand what the problem is here. It's the perception rather than the intent.' It doesn't make any difference what my intent was, it's the perception. And, as they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it's not a very good joke. And I'm certainly - " (audience applause) "- thank you. Well, my responsibility - I take full blame for that. I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception. And since it was a joke I told, I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke. It's not your fault that it was misunderstood, it's my fault. That it was misunderstood." (audience applauds) "Thank you. So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future. Thank you very much." (audience applause)

Luckily, 7-year-old Piper Palin, like Bristol, was nowhere near A-Rod or Yankee Stadium that day, otherwise Dave might really be in hot water!

11:35 p.m. Monday. CBS.

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