Knock, Knock, Who's There? The Letterman Joke

A Chicago columnist named Mary Mitchell decided to weigh in on the Letterman-Palin war but did so rather clumsily.

While in New York the Palins, Sarah, her husband Todd and 14-year-old daughter Willow went to a Yankee game.

Letterman's joke: An awkward moment occurred during the 7th inning when Sarah Palin's daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.

In criticizing Letterman for his tasteless joke, Mitchell also thought it important to blast the Palins as well.

She writes:

"Knocked up?" Forget for a moment that the joke was beneath the level of a host who is considered the king of late-night comedy. But "knocked up" is a crass term that reflects a negative attitude about pregnant women.

Is "knocked up" really that offensive a term? After all, a movie by the same name turned out to be pretty popular and well-received, though it did contain a lot of very crass jokes.

And the Palin family seized the opportunity to exploit Letterman's "despicable" joke by claiming the funnyman was talking about Willow.

Well, she WAS the daughter who was at the game. Why wouldn't they assume he was talking her. Why wouldn't anyone?

Letterman, of course, left himself wide open. Because while some people might think Bristol Palin deserves to be the butt of bad jokes, she might just be the most popular teenage mom since Jamie Lee Spears.

Some people being, well Mary Mitchell, I guess.

By dragging Willow into the dust-up, the Palins are again able to divert attention away from the real issues involving their oldest daughter.

Again, it was Letterman who dragged Willow into the dust-up, not the Palins. She was AT THE GAME. Bristol wasn't.

But here is the capper:

Bristol is an 18-year-old unmarried mother who is going through baby-daddy drama. As such, her life mocks the family values conservatives such as her mother preach.

What we have here is Mary Mitchell trying to mock and mischaracterize conservatives and their so-called family values.

One of those values, especially among pro-life conservatives, is that if your teenage daughter gets pregnant, you don't throw her out of the house or rush her to an abortion clinic. What you do is deal with the situation in a loving and life-respecting way. As far as I can tell, that is what the Palins have done.

If liberals want to seize on Bristol's pregancy as evidence that abstinence-only school programs don't work or something like that, I suppose they are free to try. It might even be reasonable for them to do so, if Bristol had no other sort of sex education, which for some reason I doubt. But certainly the other sort of sex education that has been taught in the lower 48 states over the past 30 years, the kind that taught kids about "safe sex," and the specific techniques to engage in it, didn't do much to stop teen pregnancy, as it exploded during the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

But to claim Bristol's pregnancy and her actually having the baby, makes a "mockery" out of her family's values is so lame it could almost be a Letterman joke.