Alan Colmes, the guy who used to get paid to lose debates to Sean Hannity, has been circulating the following joke which Jay Leno told on The Tonight Show, way back on September 2, 2008, right in the midst of the campaign…
Gov. Palin announced over the weekend that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before! Now he has really done it.
The premise in citing this line is to suggest that since no one scolded Leno for it, David Letterman is being held to a different, perhaps hypocritical standard when he's excoriated for his joke about how "…at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her [Sarah Palin's] daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez." Bloggers are asking, "What's the difference between the two jokes?"
There are two differences. One is that Leno's joke was unambiguously about Bristol Palin, who was seventeen and unmarried and pregnant. Letterman meant his joke to be about Bristol, and most people I'm sure took it as being about Bristol. But Palin was at the Yankee game with her 14-year-old daughter, Willow.
You can decide for yourself if Palin is just seizing upon the difference here to try and claim that Letterman was suggesting the statutory rape of Willow Palin…or if she actually believes that's what the joke meant. You could even imagine that it's what Letterman intended but I think you'd be really off-base if you did. Anyway, that's one of the differences.
The other difference is that Leno made his joke during the campaign. For Palin or her supporters to have raised a fuss then would have been to prompt more discussion of Bristol's unwed mother status at a time when they didn't want it to be more of an issue than it already was. They'd spun it, somewhat successfully, as a matter of, "Yes, well, she had this child but the young man's going to marry her so it was just a matter of this young married couple having their honeymoon a little early." A little more spotlight though and you might have had people saying…well, the kind of thing that Conservatives would have said had it been a Democratic nominee with an unwed mother in the family: "Lousy, permissive parent…can't run his/her own family so how can he/she run the country?, etc."
But now the election's over and given the polls lately, Palin doesn't have much to lose by attacking. She's already lost everyone who's going to decide she's been an irresponsible mother. So why shouldn't she lash out, especially at a guy who's told hundreds of Sarah Palin jokes in which she couldn't find a factual error? She couldn't say anything in retaliation to all of them. Why shouldn't she go after the one time Letterman left her an opening? I'm not saying she's right or anything; just that it isn't surprising she's acting outraged now.