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?

Huckabee Is Ready for His Closeup

His lead in the Iowa polls has propelled Mike Huckabee into the Republican top tier, making it a certainty he will be cover-storied, 60-Minuted and commented-on ad nauseam this month.

For a start, a reporter who covered him for years in Arkansas, John Brummett, insists the former Governor is, by nature and experience, less a preacher than a huckster, "more decidedly a media man than a pulpit man," that his success "comes via a disc jockey's shtick rather than a pastor's...more Don Imus than Billy Graham."

Like the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, Huckabee got his start working in radio, reading news and weather at the age of 14 before going off to seminaries and coming back to work for a TV evangelist.

As a preacher, he supplemented his income on cable TV and, even as lieutenant governor, guest-hosted for a radio talk show host. That would explain Huckabee's ease with pop cultural references, such as complaining last spring that his campaign was drawing less attention than "Britney Spears getting out a car without underwear."

Now the attention is there. In the Los Angeles Times yesterday, Huckabee was pictured playing his electric guitar and quoted as saying, "I drink a different kind of Jesus juice."

Out front now with the leaders now, he will be drawing fire for lack of ardor in tax-cutting by the Grover Norquist gang, softness as a self-styled Second-Commandment Christian and other perceived shortcomings by the Religious Right, possibly even Willie-Horton attacks for commuting the sentence of a rapist who later killed a woman.
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But Huckabee's amiable MC manner may be concealing a much tougher campaigner. Nobody should underestimate the determination of a man who dieted and sweated off 110 pounds to save his health and now regularly runs in marathons.

Those cover stories won't be dull.

Dan Rather's Rage

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas’ fierce poem must have influenced Dan Rather in adolescence, as it did me, and now he has taken it to heart by suing CBS and its executives for the dying of his TV light sooner than deserved.

His $70 million lawsuit claims the network violated his contract by not giving him enough airtime on “60 Minutes” after he was forced to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005 and that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” investigation of the broadcast about George W. Bush’s National Guard service and thereby “seriously damaged his reputation.”

If it goes to trial, the suit should shed light on more than Rather’s treatment by CBS. The piece of journalism in question played a part, potentially crucial, in Bush’s 2004 reelection and diverted attention from the truth about the President’s service during Vietnam to the shaky reporting about it by CBS.

By calling into question the authenticity of one letter, it allowed the Rove Smear Machine to drum up sympathy for Bush’s “mistreatment” by the media rather than continuing the inquiry into his evasion of combat service during the war.

Skeptics will note that Rather’s action comes only after Don Imus extracted a settlement from the network of his contract and that his hurt feelings have been consoled all along by continuing to collect his $6 million annual salary. But CBS’ casual willingness to sacrifice his lifetime of good work as a respected reporter to placate Bush yahoos is a subject that deserves an airing.

It certainly won’t get it on “60 Minutes.”