You’ll have to excuse me. I got to this high school cat fight a little late. I was in wood shop when someone ran in and told everyone that Sarah Palin and David Letterman were having it out on the quad. So, I ran all the way here from the wood shop building, let me catch my breath for a moment…

Okay. One of the sophomores that has been here from the start just filled me in. Here’s what went down:  On Monday, Letterman made a joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, getting “knocked up” by Alex Rodriguez at a Yankee Game. On Tuesday, Letterman continued the thread, joking that “the toughest part of her visit was keeping [former New York Gov.] Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter.”

Rightfully so, Palin responded that she was offended by Letterman’s crass jokes and claimed that he was making the jokes about her 14-year old, Tonka (or Track, or some silly-ass name), instead of about her 18-year old, Bristol, who was knocked up and had a child out of wedlock.

So, on Wednesday night, Letterman took seven minutes on his Late Show to apologize to Palin and her family, to insist that he was referring to Bristol and not the 14-year old Excursion (or Piper or Boeing), and to invite her and her husband, Todd, onto the show so that he could apologize in person.

End of story, right? Legendary Late Night host apologizes wholeheartedly and extends the olive branch. Any reasonable person would accept that and move on with their life, right? Not so fast, we’re talking about the Palins here. The next day, they released a statement that they wouldn’t accept the invitation to be on Letterman’s show and that “it would be wise to keep Willow(ed: the 14-year old) away from David Letterman.”

Okay…

So, let’s go through a little exercise for a second here. Say that you’re Sarah Palin. You paraded your family as the paragon of American ideals during a failed campaign with John McCain, even when you’re oldest daughter was knocked up at the age of 17 by her knuckle-dragging boy toy. Instead of pushing your daughter back away from the spotlight shining on you, you decide to drag her around with you and somehow get her boy toy to propose marriage.

Later, after you lost the campaign and your daughter has given birth to a child out of wedlock, you continue to blather on about abstinence-only education for teens. Your single-mother of a daughter backs away from your statements and says that abstinence-only doesn’t work. Then, a few days later, she reverses course and becomes a spokesperson for abstinence-only education. Let me repeat that last one; an 18-year old single mother is a spokesperson for abstinence-only education.

So, let’s say that, after all of this, a late-night talk show host makes a few jokes about your daughter getting knocked up by a Yankee slugger and keeping her away from a known adulterer. Bad taste, sure, but certainly within bounds, since it was you who dragged your oldest daughter into the spotlight in the first place.

But, apparently Sarah Palin doesn’t understand hypocrisy. You can’t make your daughter famous in the eyes of America, allow her to grace the cover of People magazine (among others) and not expect someone to take a shot at her, whether in bad taste or no. That’s just stupid. Once she’s a public figure, she’s fair game. You can’t throw a high school hissy fit and insinuate that a venerated late night host like David Letterman, who is married and has a child of his own, is a pedophile and made those comments about the 14-year old daughter that no one knows or cares about.

Not only that, but you certainly can’t, after Letterman has publicly apologized, restate that Letterman can’t be trusted around 14-year old girls and state that he had contributed to “acceptance of abuse of young women.” This is not high school, Sarah Palin. You don’t get to keep talking shit about people after they have apologized to you, when they didn’t really have to in the first place. You especially don’t get to keep talking shit about someone who has more credibility in the eyes of the public than you do, is smarter than you, has a nightly talk show on which to lambaste you from now until forever, and is more of an adult than you appear to be.

This is not high school. This is not your small town, where you can bully people into believing you, or at least acquiescing to your point of view. You need to grow up or go home. I’d prefer the latter.

Oh, and one last thing; As someone who grew up in northern Minnesota, just down the road from the Arctic Cat headquarters and manufacturing center and who routinely went to bars and restaurants in the wintertime that had more Arctic Cat and Polaris parked out front than cars, I have to point out, once and for all- it’s SNOW MOBILE, not snow machine. You know what a snow machine actually is? This:

It’s a machine that makes snow. Not a machine that you ride on snow. That’s this:

Big difference, you dumb hick.

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