…does Palin have a point?

Ugh, so some of you might be aware of the latest Sarah Palin publicity ploy.  She went to NYC to get a little face time and do some interviews and brought some family with her.  David Letterman catches wind of it and cracks a bunch of jokes about her.  Including a joke about a baseball player and notorious womanizer getting Palin’s daughter pregnant.

Oops:  the daughter that came to NYC was the 14 year-old and not the 18 year-old.

So there’s been all sorts of outcry from the Palin camp.  Accusations of joking about rape have been repeatedly made and a few snide comments about how Letterman is just trying to ride on Palin’s coat tails. Letterman made a serious apology, stressing that if he knew that it was the minor daughter, then he would have never cracked that joke.

Ok, so here’s the part that I think we ought to discuss.

Letterman’s explanation that he was referring to her 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, instead of her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, who accompanied her recently to New York, was met with derision by the governor. She called the remarks a "very convenient excuse" that took him a couple of days to present. "It was a degrading comment about a young woman. I would hope that people really start rising up and deciding it’s not acceptable. No wonder young girls especially have such low self-esteem in America when we think it’s funny for a so-called comedian to get away with being able to make such a remark as he did and to think that that’s acceptable, " Palin said.

My knee-jerk reflex is to hate on the Palins and support Dave.  Because I think its fairly obvious that the joke was on Bristol.  But when I think about it, she’s still right and its a sexist joke.

I’m just a junior feminist, so its still tough for me to pull apart "respecting women" into feminist and anti-feminist components.  And please don’t interpret this as condoning or supporting her politics.  But maybe we should acknowledge that we agree sometimes, while pointing out the distinct differences in the source of our agreement…

I don’t know.  Anyone want to help me parse this one out?