Well, far from me to hold off giving another couple of energetic thwacks to the deceased equine, with regard to David Letterman’s tasteless and ill-considered joke about Governor Palin’s daughter (whichever daughter was meant) and a baseball player, but what the heck, now Bill Maher has gotten into the act – apparently aggrieved at how upset a large portion of the people who heard about said tasteless and ill-considered joke have become. Ah, well, that’s what happens when you engage your yap before your mind is in gear.

So – do I think people are overreacting? Meh … maybe they are – it was pretty crude ‘n crass, but stacked up to all the bales of crude n’ crass delivered to Chez Palin, courtesy of our so-called media and intellectual elite over the last eight months, it was a pretty pale effort. But that might be the point – it was the final, absolutely last, penultimate straw. Look, a lot of people in flyover America really liked Sarah Palin, when she sprung up onto the national scene, like Athena stepping out of Zeus’ absolutely splitting headache. So she turned out to be John McCain’s absolutely splitting headache, as well as an opportunity for a lot of the mainline established feminist figures to go eeek! over a woman who turned out to be everything they claimed to have been working for, lo, these last forty years. The monstering of her, and her family, and even the heave-ho from John McCain when it was all over did not go over real well in flyover country … where blue-collar couples work a couple of jobs, and scratch together their education from no-name community colleges and state schools, and where the grandparents look after the children, and going to church on Sunday (not just for weddings and funerals) is pretty much a given. People hunt, and hike, and plant gardens and run for the PTA or the city council, and do a pretty good job at looking after themselves and their communities. And we sat back and watched all that be slimed by the very superior political aristocracy and their sycophants in the old-line media, and god save us, what passes for intellectuals in these degraded days. And no, we did not care for it at all. Not one bit.

And so an aging and unfunny late-night talk host slaps a knowing smirk on his face and delivers a desperately crass and barely humorous line, while his obliging audience of wanna-be hipsters obediently chortle … and some days later he (and his equally knowing and sarcastic friend) is wondering loudly what happened, and why is everyone picking on him, what did he do? It was only a joke, man … don’t you hicks in the sticks have any sense of humor? There is talk of consumers boycotting Late Night Show sponsors, and even a letter or two of complaint filed (with much noisy fanfare to the FCC) and even the National Organization of Women has bestirred themselves to file an angry comment.

OK, Mr. Letterman, I’ll explain it to you in simple terms: no, you did not happen to tread heavily and publicly on your own d**k. Not with that particular joke. You just had the bad luck to be the one among the smirking brigade of so-called comedians who delivered the one single line that crossed the line, that was the absolutely last straw – or even the match that set the whole gasoline-soaked pile of previous straws alight. All that accumulated anger on the part of the public just picked your face to explode in, like one of those joke cigars in an old Three Stooges comedy. It isn’t personal, and it may even not be about that particular joke. It’s just that there’s a lot of suppressed anger in flyover country … you know, from those people outside your cozy little studio and oh-so-hip little world, all those people in Lubbock, or Muncie, or Bakersfield or Peoria. Hey, sport, they watch your show, too – remember? So, they just got fed up about the treatment of Sarah Palin and her family, and your little throwaway gag exploded all that combustible material. Hey, they just picked that joke and you as the chosen scapegoat; could have been any other joke, any other late night host or TV anchor with delusions of adequacy. You just got lucky, and now you are an object lesson, in what happens when you blunder over that line, and just that one little step too far. You must feel so special.

Oh, and say hi to the Dixie Chicks next time you see them.