Letterman has enjoyed a temporary ratings boost, but there’s deeper meaning in the incident.  The cultural left lampoons Palin because her values and life are completely foreign to them. They find it bizarre that she hunts, prays and says things like “you betcha.’”  They can’t fathom that she brought a child with Down syndrome to term and that she didn’t pressure her daughter into aborting an unexpected pregnancy… [Letterman's] Palin joke backfired in part because scores of millions of Americans are living lives that more closely resemble Palin’s life than Letterman’s.

The incident did end with at least one advertiser, The Olive Garden, telling consumers that it would not buy more ads on the show this year.

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Letterman and his ilk can continue to make all of the coverage about Palin revolve around her daughters, forcing her to respond and to look less serious as a politician … if enough of them do it, the downside for her attackers will be small, and the upside will be to kneecap Palin before she can threaten Democrats in a future election.

Do any Democrats actually fear Palin as a national candidate anymore? We’re talking about the first woman on a Republican ticket that got only 43 percent of the female vote, the lowest in a two-way presidential race since, I believe, 1964. If anything, I think Democrats will regret anything that eliminates Palin from a 2012 primary, where should would drain the oxygen from all other candidate coverage while battling (perhaps unsuccessfully) a party establishment that considers her unreliable and unelectable.

After two nights of “jokes” at the expense of Palin and her family, Letterman tried to explain himself and offer something of an apology. On his June 10 show, Letterman said he was referring to Palin’s 18-year-old daughter, Bristol — not the 14-year-old daughter who actually accompanied Palin on her New York trip. Letterman said “I recognize that these are ugly” jokes. NOW agrees. Comedians in search of a laugh should really know better than to snicker about men having sex with teenage girls (or young women) less than half their age.

The organization appends a request that “all the conservatives who are fired up about sexism in the media lately will join us in calling out sexism when it is directed at women who aren’t professed conservatives,” but curiously it dredges up the old example of Rush Limbaugh mocking Chelsea Clinton instead of the very fresh and nearly omnipresent sexist jokes about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and first lady Michelle Obama. If nothing else, this negates Roger Pilon’s atypically fatuous question about Palin and Letterman: “Where is the outrage from the Left? Where are the feminists?”

Last month, he bailed out at the last minute on appearing on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, ostensibly to fly to Washington to save America from economic collapse.  But before heading to Capitol Hill, he paid a visit to CBS’ Katie Couric and bummed around New York City for almost a day. The comedian spent a significant portion of the night McCain canceled castigating him and has lambasted McCain on subsequent nights.

Letterman’s bitter tongue-lashing generated torrents of bad press for the GOP presidential nominee. McCain responded by re-scheduling the appearance for today, when he is also in town to speak at the Al Smith charity dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

After appearing at a campaign rally in Downingtown, Pa., The Washington Post reports that McCain’s plane sat on the tarmac at the Philadelphia airport for nearly an hour before receiving news that an air traffic delay of two hours would prevent the plane from taking off. McCain wouldn’t keep his appointment with Letterman.

But rather than surrendering himself again to Letterman’s wrath — and several more news cycles in which Letterman’s wrath would be replayed on cable news networks — the McCain campaign booked a helicopter and choppered into New York. His media pool would have to be stay behind. Reporters then frantically called colleagues in New York to cover McCain when he landed.

The upside of this is that the fill-in print pooler, presumably not wanting to let down his colleagues in need,  took copious notes of McCain’s interview with Letterman. From the pool report:

Mr. McCain jokingly said that he asked his son in the Marine Corps to FedEx his flak jacket in preparation for the visit.

Mr. Letterman immediately referenced the candidates’ abrupt cancellation last month. He asked: “So what happened?”

Mr. McCain answered: “I screwed up.” After the audience applauded, he continued, “Look at all the conversation I gave you. Including having Mr. Olbermann on.”

Mr. McCain added: “I haven’t had so much fun since my last interrogation.”

Letterman actually got in some pretty tough questions:

Asked by Mr. Letterman whether Sarah Palin was his “first choice” for vice president, Mr. McCain said “absolutely.” He added: “I didn’t know her well at all. I knew her reputation.”

Mr. Letterman pressed Mr. McCain on Palin’s preparation for the office of president, and asked whether she was “the woman to lead us thru the next 9/11 attack.”

“Absolutely,” she is, Mr. McCain said. “She has inspired Americans. That’s the thing we need.”

Mr. Letterman also asked if Palin had said that Sen. Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists.” Mr. McCain started to say he didn’t know, then said, “Yes. And he did.”

Then Mr. Letterman raised Mr. McCain’s relationship with G. Gordon Liddy. “I’ve met him,” Mr. McCain said. After a segment break, he followed up: “I know Gordon Liddy. He paid his debt, he went to prison, he paid his debt.”

This may be the first time McCain has been asked about his connection to Liddy, who was convicted and imprisoned for participating in the Watergate break-in –certainly the first since the McCain campaign started focusing on Obama’s ties to former Weatherman William Ayers. A scathing Op-Ed published in The Chicago Tribune raised the Liddy issue earlier this year:

How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy’s home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator’s campaigns — including $1,000 this year.

Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as “an old friend,” and McCain sounded like one. “I’m proud of you, I’m proud of your family,” he gushed. “It’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.”

Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap anti-war activists so they couldn’t disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?

Perhaps Letterman mapped out a strategy for the Obama campaign to hit back if the Ayers thing every catches on.

You can see the interview tonight on CBS.

These guys will all soon be the personal property of Harry Shearer. (Flickr: Trainman74)

He doesn’t know this yet, but I’m putting in a bid to purchase Bruce McCall.

I like and admire Bruce, but that has nothing to do with my plan. I happen to know that he’s up to his ears with a mortgage on his condo. Since that mortgage has long since been securitized and sold to a Singapore bank that’s about to fail, I can swoop in and get the whole package on the cheap.

Hey, vultures gotta eat, too.

As fine a purchase as that will be, it’s just the opening move of my plan.

I’ll leverage my Bruce property to the hilt, and go on a comedy and humorist buying spree — Joy Behar, Steve Carell, Chris Buckley, Sandra Bernhard, Craig Ferguson. They’ll all fit nicely into my portfolio. Leveraging them will net me Dave, Jay and Conan. Maybe even Matt Groening.

This isn’t about the hang, interesting as that prospect might be. My purpose is to create a corporate humor leviathan. Maybe we’ll call it American International Comedy, or AIC.

Old-school thinkers might surmise that my ultimate goal is to create a kind of monopoly, and raise everybody’s price — what you might call the Mike Ovitz approach. But this is now, and what I’m after is simple: a comedy combine that’s too big to fail.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

That’s only the beginning. More leverage brings more talent, and more connections to media leviathans worldwide — how many countries does Ricky Gervais entertain? How many state-owned TV networks have millions tied up in “Simpsons” reruns?

There’s no point in being too big to fail unless you can tiptoe or tapdance right up to, or just over, the edge of the cliff.

We’ll invest everybody’s earnings in perfectly wonderful financial instruments that the humorists themselves will invent. Then, boom! Or, strictly speaking, whatever the opposite of boom is.

Sure, there will be those outliers who think the government has no business bailing out a collection of laughmasters. Do they understand how much property Will Ferrell owns in Mexico? If all those haciendas get dumped on the market at once, ay caramba!

Once the government gives us a multi-billion-dollar bridge loan — cynics will call it a “bridge loan to nowhere,” but let them laugh — the feds will own 80 percent of all of yoksters, and we can relax.

Just like, let’s say, FEMA.

Harry Shearer is the host of the weekly radio show “Le Show,” the co-writer of “This Is Spinal Tap” and a musician and actor. His new album is “Songs of the Bushmen.”