Paging Dr. Phil for Letterman

We can figure out how to defeat terrorists in Afghanistan, get health care reform through Congress or save David Letterman's seven-month marriage, but doing all of the above may bring on a severe case of media overload.

Of the three national dilemmas, Letterman's is beginning to look like the worst, with a slow drip of liaison disclosures coupled with his own continuing on-camera mea culpas.

"When something happens like that," he told his audience last night, "if you hurt a person and it's your responsibility, you try to fix it. And at that point, there's only two things that can happen: Either you're going to make some progress and get it fixed, or you're going to fall short and perhaps not get it fixed, so let me tell you folks, I got my work cut out for me."

The problem with Letterman's TV self-therapy is that such attempted sincerity is a poor fit for a figure whose career has been based on being snarky about everybody else's shortcomings.

He has progressed from last week's tap-dance about being blackmailed for "creepy" behavior to now thanking his staff for "putting up with something stupid I've gotten myself involved in."

If we're ever going to hear the end of it, Letterman may have to book Dr. Phil to put him through a full round of cathartic psychobabble and let it all hang out.

Meanwhile, there will be more late-night laughs available on Conan O'Brien's show.

Letterman, Polanski, Palin and Beck

In last night's monologue, David Letterman makes a little joke about avoiding award ceremonies for fear of being nabbed for sexual misconduct (as Roman Polanski was in Switzerland) and then gives his audience a no-laughs account of being blackmailed over having affairs with women who work on his show.

We are deep into media-outdoes-real-life here, in the terrain of the 1976 "Network" movie that posited a TV anchorman who goes raving mad, is exploited for ratings and then killed on-air when they drop.

Letterman will no doubt overcome his extortion embarrassment as easily as he did the flap over a tasteless A-Rod/Sarah Palin daughter joke last summer as he continues on his new $90 million contract, while the ex-Alaska governor matches his income, thanks to Rupert Murdoch's underwriting of her sure-fire best-selling memoir next month and career as a commentator for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Unless Palin's political career miraculously revives, all this might be filed as entertainment news, if it were not for the concurrent rise of Glenn Beck as a rival to Rush Limbaugh for the mad-as-hell-not-going-to-take-it-anymore crowd.

A lifelong radio-TV mouth with a history of alcoholism and drug abuse, Beck now rates a Time cover and a section of his own on the White House blog to correct the lies and distortions he is spewing over Murdoch's media.

In the New York Times, under the heading, "The Wizard of Beck," conservative columnist David Brooks tells "a story of remarkable volume and utter weakness. It is the story of media mavens who claim to represent a hidden majority but who in fact represent a mere niche--even in the Republican Party. It is a story as old as 'The Wizard of Oz,' of grand illusions and small men behind the curtain."

Brooks is right, of course, but the conflation of show biz and real life continues as surely it was starting to do decades ago when I ran into my high-school classmate Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote "Network," in a restaurant on his way to meet William Paley, the founding father of CBS and the archetype of TV executives lampooned in his movie.

"I must admit," Paddy confessed, "I'm a little nervous about meeting him."

After he left, the agent with me said, "He should be. They showed 'Network' on CBS last week, and it got lousy ratings."

Palin: Media Martyr's Revenge

The self-styled victim of "the politics of personal destruction" has struck back at her tormenters by leaving Alaska's statehouse with trademark twinkly, crinkly aggression.

Sarah Palin dropped her bombshell on the eve of a holiday weekend, sending TV's talking heads scrambling back from vacation to studios or huffing over long-distance phone lines to parse her resignation.

Their puzzled but predictable responses ranged from William Kristol and Mary Matalin hailing the move as a masterstroke toward the 2012 presidential nomination to the consensus about it as bizarre and, in the words of Republican strategist Ed Rollins, "terribly inept."

In ten months on the national scene, Palin has tried to make ineptness an asset by equating competence with "politics as usual" and picturing herself as champion of the resentful and inarticulate from Joe the Plumber down

Palin's complaints about the media notwithstanding, her next logical move will be to follow the folk wisdom, "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em," and become a commentator for Fox News, where Rupert Murdoch will surely be happy to provide her with an income and national platform to ease the pain of her abuse by David Letterman and Vanity Fair.

In that role, and in lucrative lectures to right-wing Republican faithful, the former Governor will be free to exhibit her 21st century Animal Farm--from the pit bull with lipstick through yesterday's additions, the lame duck who milks a paycheck and dead fish who go with the flow.

In that ramble, Gov. Palin asserted that it would be "tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up. But that’s a worthless, easy path out. That’s a quitter’s way out."

Then she quit.

Her future colleague, Mike Huckabee, was rushed onto Fox News to hail her "spunk." Unlike Mary Tyler Moore's old TV boss Ed Asner, Huckabee was both collegially and politically restrained from a more understandable reaction, "I hate spunk."

Palin-Letterman Privacy Pox

The Great Cultural Divide has split wider open with the Queen of Low-Rent Resentment and the Sultan of Snark in open warfare, leaving those who still hope for rational public discourse waiting for it all to go away so we can talk about boring subjects like health care reform and saving the economy.

Yet somewhere between Sarah Palin's aggressive anti-elitism and David Letterman's snidely assumed superiority, there is an issue beyond the need of politicians and media figures to keep calling attention to themselves--questions of privacy and boundaries,

Letterman critics are crying foul with claims of child abuse and misogyny in his joke about Palin's daughter and A-Rod, but is hanging the appropriate penalty for bad taste (see Imus, nappy-headed ho's), as a New York lawmaker insists in a letter to CBS?

Such posturing aside (the Late Show host is about to sign a new three-year deal for an estimated $90 million plus), the more interesting question is about the lengths to which Gov. Palin herself is willing to exploit her children for political gain, going so far as to willfully distort Letterman's admittedly bad joke about her 18-year-old daughter into one about a 14-year-old.

Fake outrage is a time-honored political ploy, but the Palin family is breaking new ground here, as they did at the Republican convention last year by having the high-school stud who impregnated the older girl smiling and waving at the TV cameras and then, after the baby was born, exchanging public insults with him for reneging on his promise to marry her and cashing in on the fame they handed him with TV interviews of his own.

This upward spiral of trading privacy for political gain is so dizzying that it's possible to be offended by Letterman's bad taste while feeling the object of it is dragging American politics to new lows.

Now can we talk about serious matters like Stephen Colbert's haircut in Iraq and guest-editing an issue of Newsweek?