People have been asking me for days to weigh in on the whole Dave-and-Sarah contretemps, and I've been redirecting people to Mark Evanier's essay that I thought said it pretty well. Chip and I talked about it on the air today, just long enough to conclude it was a mutually beneficial feud, like Jack Benny and Fred Allen or Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie. (Yeah, like I remember any of those guys...)

I will say this. What David Letterman did was the late-night comedian's equivalent of a typo. He got a fact wrong without checking, which he does all the time — in last Thursday's monologue, I noticed that he screwed up the million-dollar mattress story — but this time he got called on it, and suffered huge consequences. On the face of it, the outrage directed at Letterman is obviously overblown, but the point is, the way not to give opportunistic people the chance to attack you is to not screw up. It's a simple rule that makes every good journalist pick up the phone or do a Google if there's any questionable fact in that story about to be filed.



Anyway, Dave has apologized on tonight's show, which airs in about half an hour. I've only read the transcript but clearly this is one of these times when Dave musters up all the earnestness he can, and looks into the camera and speaks from his patched-up heart. In this department, no one in American television is Letterman's equal. He is an amazing broadcaster, and he is never better than when he is trying to control a media moment. He speaks to Middle America in a way few can. And he is doing the Midwestern thing, manning up, gallantly taking all the blame ... and in so doing, he will, I predict right here, completely defuse this pointless controversy, this last gasp of the faux-prudishness of the Republican Party.

He sure has come a long way from Dick Assman and the Peach Lady, hasn't he?



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