David Letterman finally apologized for the joke he made last week about Sarah Palin and her daughter, a joke that was clearly in bad taste.
When I first heard about Sarah Palin, just after it was announced that she would be the running mate of John McCain in 2008, I remember the disbelief that I felt. Whatever temporary insanity possessed the inhabitants of Alaska when they elected her (or is it just that we live in an era of political populism, be it the case of the once small town mayor now popular governor of Alaska or, say, the once Teheran mayor now popular president of Iran?) my immediate reaction when I saw governor Palin and her family on television was to wonder if I might have accidentally set on my remote and switched to The Jerry Springer Show without noticing. Everything about governor Palin: her mannerisms (including how she manages to include wannabe beauty queen phrases like “the great state of Alaska” into every second sentence she utters), her family life, the names she gave to her children… about the only thing missing from the picture was a fight on stage, to be broken up by security.
Now I don’t wish to fall into the same trap as Letterman… family members, especially underage family members of a politician are not fair game, not even for late night comics. Yet, if the Palin family accurately reflects “conservative family values”, then perhaps it is appropriate to question the validity of those values, and possible to do so without insulting unwitting members of the Palin family. On the other hand, if the Palin family does not accurately reflect conservative family values, then perhaps it is right to accuse conservatives of hypocrisy, again without ad hominem insults.