Protesters—15 of 'em!—who gathered outside a Late Show With David Letterman taping yesterday had a hard time finding a consistent message.

One responded to Letterman's jokes about Sarah Palin's daughters by suggesting that Letterman's son, who "was born out of wedlock," was fair game for mockery. "I believe there's a term for that," the protester hinted.

Another responding to Letterman's joke about Palin dressing like a "slutty flight attendant" by suggesting that Letterman himself had "a slut for a wife."

Yet another responded to I don't know what by suggesting that David Letterman will "rape you with his mouth."

Others expressed more creative gripes with the late-night comedian, or "the general sentiment that Jay Leno is a better host than Letterman."

Also, one of them thinks Alex Rodriguez plays basketball.

Methinks these protesters may need a refresher course on how not to fight hypocrisy with hypocrisy. And also, maybe, American professional sports.

David Letterman apologized to Sarah Palin and her family last night for telling that joke. Palin accepted, saying:

Of course it's accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who 'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve.

Letterman certainly has the right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the right to express our reaction," Palin said. "This is all thanks to our U.S. Military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's Right to Free Speech—in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect.

Hey, minus the military-protecting-our-right-to-get-mad-at-rape-jokes stuff,  they both sounds pretty reasonable to me.

It is a simple formula for both comedy and political commentary:

Take a public figure (Sarah Palin) who holds disagreeable views (abstinence-only education). Zero in on an aspect of her personal life counter to those views (her own teen daughter, Bristol Palin, becoming pregnant). Reveal the comedic irony and/or hypocrisy of the public/private contrast. Repeat ad nauseam on blogs, 24-hour news channels, and late night talk shows.

We should all beware this construction. Though very easy to pull off—and often journalistically and comedically sound—it is a trap. And it will render us all hypocrites. Three lessons from history, after the jump.

SARAH PALIN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: Too many to count, but in this case, it's the abstinence thing.

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: When Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol became pregnant months before Palin rose to political fame as John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, political commentators and comedians held up Bristol's pregnancy as evidence that abstinence is futile—even under the roof of your state's no-sex-before-marriage Governor.

IT'S A TRAP! The revelation came at the height of election season fervor, and liberal commentators ate Bristol's sexual activity up with a spoon. The term "knocked up" became par for the course. When the baby's father, Levi Johnston, told Tyra Banks that he and Bristol had practiced safe sex, Tyra et. al dismissed him as a liar. The late-night comedy cycle feasted on the Bristol-is-a-slut jokes. Even Palin family cheerleader Greta Van Susteren asked Bristol if she had been "lazy."

We forgot that even the most responsible of 17-year-old condom users don't put it on right every time. We forgot that condoms break. And we forgot that, when you're the governor's daughter in the small town of Wasilla, requesting birth control from your family doctor, seeking Plan B at a local pharmacy, or even buying condoms—anywhere—could cause such a shit-storm for you, your boyfriend, and your family, that it would have been hard to mount the courage to even approach the counter.

At some point, we forgot about why Bristol having sex was funny to begin with. The insane glee that we all derived from a teenage girl having sex before marriage became counter-intuitive—and downright creepy. We had crossed the hypocrisy bridge. We were no longer making a point about how young women should be free to choose to be sexually active. We no longer joked to show how bogus abstinence was. We joked to show that Bristol Palin was slutty, and that was enough to make it funny.

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CARRIE PREJEAN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: During the Q-and-A section of  the 2009 Miss USA pageant, Miss USA California Carrie Prejean described her views on same-sex marriage this way:

"I think it's great that americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage, and in my country, and my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be a man or a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that was how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be. Between a man and a woman. Thank you."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: After rising to blogosphere infamy—with the help of question-asker Perez Hilton's videoblog declaring her a "bitch"—Prejean's past modeling career caught up to her. When topless photos of the 21-year-old Prejean surfaced on the Web, Prejean was accused of both violating her pageant contract and preaching inconsistent moral views. Who is she to preach good Christian values when she's flaunting her assets for cash?

IT'S A TRAP! Wait a second—since when did we start caring about women upholding the contractual obligations of beauty pageants? Pageants are among the most sexist and anti-feminist of American traditions. They encourage patriarchal views about the traditional roles women and men should hold in society. And guess what—gays don't have a place there.

But the patriarchy is also responsible for one of the most damaging of all hypocrisy constructions: the virgin-whore dichotomy. Shaming Carrie Prejean—a woman we've elevated through beauty pageants—for taking topless modeling photos is a very short leap for shaming gays and lesbians for expressing their sexuality. That's why this whole thing was hypocritical in the first place—but perhaps we're all too distracted by Carrie Prejean's boobs to remember. We may keep posting them in the interest of "revealing hypocrisy." But we all know the real reason they're on the Web: It's not hypocrisy anymore; it's hotness.

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LARRY CRAIG

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: As a Republican Senator from Idaho, Craig often championed conservative moral values. William Saletan got specific in 2007, pointing out that Craig "helped to enact the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," revealing his "anti-gay hypocrisy."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: In June of 2007, Craig was arrested for soliciting sex from a male undercover cop in the Minneapolis airport:

According to the report filed by the officer who arrested Craig at the Minneapolis airport in June, Craig stood outside the officer's bathroom stall for two minutes, repeatedly looked at the officer "through the crack in the door," sat in the stall next to the officer, tapped his foot, and gradually "moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot … within my stall area." Craig proceeded to "swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds" three times, palm up, using the hand farthest from that side of Craig's stall. Most of these gestures, the officer explained, were known pickup signals in a room known (and hence under surveillance for) public sex. When the officer took Craig outside and told him so, Craig claimed he had been reaching down with his hand to retrieve a piece of paper from the floor. The officer wrote that no such paper had been on the floor.

IT'S A TRAP! I'll admit it—this is rich, fertile ground for the hypocrisy construction. Craig blows Palin and Prejean out of the water with this Perfect 10 hypocritical move: enacting anti-gay policies in law, and being gay in private. Jokes at Craig's expense were easy, valid, and very popular.

Conservatives, when not denying that any of this happened, joined in the shit-throwing. After all, this is the stuff homophobes' nightmares are made of—strange gay men attempting to have sex with them while they're taking care of business in a public restroom. For them, Craig reinforced the idea that homosexuals are sick and disgusting individuals just waiting to pounce on your unsuspecting bare penis. In other words, gays can pose a very real threat to their heterosexuality, and Craig proved it.

And yet, those who railed against Craig's institutionalized homophobia were the ones who took the most immense joy in the gay jokes. So—again—reveling in jokes about Larry Craig being gay began to lose their hypocritical anchor. On some level, the hypocritical construction allows people with pro-gay political views to indulge in some homophobic ribbing of their own. They see a rare window where making fun of gay sex is politically acceptable, and they sieze it. It's the same tale with Sarah Palin: People who support progressive sexual health policies, like comprehensive sex education, sieze the opportunity to make jokes about sluts. It's the same tale with Carrie Prejean: People who rail against patriarchal values, like "opposite marriage" and beauty pageants, sieze the opportunity to make sexist jokes.

So, let's all try not to descend too deeply into the hypocrisy construction's rabbit hole. Fall too far, and we become ripe for ironic commentary ourselves.

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I don't think much of Sarah Palin as a feminist, but the Alaska Governor has emerged as an interesting figure in the movement for one reason: she has encouraged conservatives to unwittingly defend women's rights, and liberals to deny them. This MSNBC clip, featuring the Huffington Post's Katharine Zaleski and the Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter, is a perfect example.

Let's find out how easily women's issues fall to the side in the interest of ideological posturing. The stage is set: you've got your liberal pundit, courtesy of HuffPo; your conservative pundit, courtesy of WaTi; and your encouragement for the two to disagree on everything no matter what, courtesy of MSNBC. Let's throw a feminist issue in there—making light of rape—and see what happens.

Here, Zaleski and Carpenter are asked to face off on David Letterman's recent Late Show joke. Letterman said this about Palin and her 14-year-old daughter Willow's recent Yankees game outing: "During the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez." Letterman later took the statement back in a joke-filled apology claiming that he had meant to make the comment about 18-year-old Bristol Palin, not Willow.

Here's what Palin had to say about it: "I found out later the comment that was made about the statutory rape of my 14-year-old daughter Willow ... that crossed the line. Then others, chiming in on other comments Letterman has made. It's quite a sad commentary on where we are as a culture and a society ... He doesn't have to apologize to me. I would like to see him apologize to young women across the country for contributing to that thread that is throughout our culture that makes it sound like it's okay to talk about young girls in that way."

Carpenter, of course, took Palin's side, arguing that the comment was unacceptable, and further, that Sarah Palin had bolstered her women's issues cred by taking a stand over the comments. "It's hard for women in general when accusations like this are made, dirty jokes and things. There's always a conflict of—do you turn your head, or do you make a statement about it and push back? And even when you make a statement, you're accused of manufacturing outrage," Carpenter said. "She took that risk. She said, this isn't acceptable. And I think women are happy to hear that message. I'm certainly one of them."

Zaleski, of course, took the anti-Palin side. Let's check out her argument here:

"Sarah Palin basically ran the hate-speak express during the campaign. She stood there and watched people as they screamed 'kill him' at Obama and 'terrorist.' If she really wants to rise above this, she'll talk about irresponsible speech in general, irresponsible speech that many of her cohorts on national networks are using, irresponsible speech that's leading to things like what happened on Wednesday at the Holocaust Museum. If she really wants to make this an issue, she won't make this about herself and her family all the time, her family who she persistently trots out there, and her daughter who she made a statement about on Thursday. . . . I challenge people like Sarah Palin, like people you talk to on Fox News, to really condemn the language that's greater, this really reprehensible language, that's not just about Bristol Palin but that's about hate speech that's basically leading to actions which happened on Wednesday. That's what's disgusting.

Again, I don't buy Palin as a feminist figure. I, too, think she too often uses her personal life—growing up fishing and hunting with the boys, and then finding great personal success in the Republican Party—as a stand-in for female empowerment, while simultaneously ignoring women's issues as candidate and Governor.

Still, there's something about Zaleski's arguments here that I find particularly anti-feminist. Let's break them down:

1. Obama's girls are off-limits, but Palin's are fair game: "If she really wants to make this an issue, she won't make this about herself and her family all the time, her family who she persistently trots out there, and her daughter who she made a statement about on Thursday."

Read: "Some girls deserve it."

2. Palin started it by making comments about Barack Obama (who is also off-limits), which is why her daughter especially deserves it. "She stood there and watched people as they screamed 'kill him' at Obama and 'terrorist.'"

Read: "She was asking for it."

3. "I challenge people like Sarah Palin, like people you talk to on Fox News, to really condemn the language that's greater, this really reprehensible language, that's not just about Bristol Palin but that's about hate speech that's basically leading to actions which happened on Wednesday. That's what's disgusting."

Read: "Rape is not a real problem. You're exaggerating."

4. Letterman claims he had intended to make the joke about Bristol Palin, and we take Letterman at his word.

Read: "Officer, I didn't know she was under 18."

UT OH:Anchorage blogger Linda Kellen Biegel, who goes by the name Celtic Diva has filed an ethics complaint with the state's Attorney General, alleging that Palin promoted First Dude Iron Dog sponsor "Arctic Cat Inc." while representing the state of Alaska by covering herself in head-to-toe Arctic Cat gear at the start of this year's snowmachine race.

PALIN STRIKES BACK:

"Are Alaskans outraged, or at least tired of this yet—another frivolous ethics charge by a political blogger? This would be hilarious if it weren't so expensive for the state to process these accusations and for me to defend against these bogus harassments. Yes, I wore Arctic Cat snow gear at an outdoor event, because it was cold outside, and by the way, today, I am wearing clothes bearing the names of Alaska artists, and a Glennallen Panthers basketball hoodie. I am a walking billboard for the team's fundraiser! Should I expect to see an ethics charge for wearing these, or the Carhartts I wear to many public events? How much will this blogger's asinine political grandstanding cost all of us in time and money?"

HOW MUCH MONEY? RedState claims Palin has racked up $500,000 in debt "defending herself against fake/false/frivolous ethics charges" since September. Public scrutiny's a bitch.

SENATOR STATES OBVIOUS: U.S. Senator Mark Begich (D—Alaska) disagrees with Palin's refusal of some federal stimulus package funds. “I worry when we throw money back to the federal government that’s designed to help our state,” said Begich. “It sends the wrong message that maybe we don’t need the money. We do need the help.”

VIDEO THROWBACK: Palin and fam moving into the Governor's mansion for the first time (cute).

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Photo via Celtic Diva

LEVI ON THE BREAK-UP: Nineteen-year-old Levi Johnston is single, ladies! His coming out party was held in front of his Wasilla home and was attended by a horde of bloodthirsty reporters. He told the AP that the decision to end things with 18-year-old Bristol was mutual and decided "a while ago." According to the AP, "He also said some details of the breakup, rumors of which had been swirling on the Internet, were inaccurate."

THE PAPES REACT: Freedom Eden compiles the worst of the worst:

Chicago Tribune: "No one saw this coming, right?"

Politico: "It's true. You probably don't believe it."

Los Angeles Times: "Bristol Palin, fiance Levi Johnston split. Surprised?"

Boston Herald: "Isn’t this the same Bristol Palin who told Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren last month that her fiancee was a hands-on dad to their son, Tripp, and they hoped to marry after finishing their education?"

And my personal favorite (drumroll please) Christian Science Monitor: "Not even the Love Boat had a happy ending every time. . . . Remember when Charo had a crush on Capitan Stubing and they didn’t end up together? Although we were all heartbroken, Charo moved on. So will Bristol Palin. For all we know, she may be the Charo of the 21st century."

PILE IT ON: Rabbi Ben Kamin, "Spiritual Life Examiner," also has something to say!:

It’s impossible not to think of Tripp, the 2½ month-old innocent baby boy who will now not have his father as husband to his mother and whose life will be stamped with the history of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the failure of a couple to keep their much-ballyhooed public promise to wed and raise their son as a family.

Oh yeah, two teenagers who were only engaged because some lady who wanted to be the most powerful Vice President in United States History made them do it, should probably just stay together "for the kids." That always works out.

HUFFPO'S SNARK: Isn't just insensitive—it's incorrect. Writes Michael Shaw on an "award-winning image by photographer Melina Mara" from Election 2008 that clearly takes on a richer meaning now that Brisvi are over:

I mean, it's all there: the smirk; the fact sister Willow was mostly the one schlepping Trig; and the irony—since Bristol's since had her own baby—of being left holding the bottle. (And then, contributing to the family values, remember First Dude's tendency—out of the spotlight—to put all kinds of distance between himself and little Trig?)

Except that Bristol's the one holding Trig. Willow's holding the bottle. The smirk is all hers. And I don't remember seeing First Dude outside of the spotlight.

FIRST DUDE WINTER SPORTS CORNER: Not a good day for sporting, dudes.

Photo by Emily from Wikipedia Commons