Once upon a time, when you had a good old-fashioned sex scandal, it was simply about, well, sex.
Even when it was about politics, it was just about sex. If powerful Congressman Wilbur Mills watched Fanne Fox take a dip in the Tidal Basin — if you’re not old enough to remember, try Wikipedia — it was sordid but also funny.
Let’s just say the story wasn’t about Mills’ political party. It was about his willingness — at age 65, which then seemed so old — to party.
That was then.
Now, we keep score, and with red- blue color coding. Now, it’s senatorial wide stance vs. presidential-candidate love child. It’s gubernatorial soul mate vs. gubernatorial prostitution ring.
Let’s see. Republicans are family- values hypocrites. Liberals are, well, too liberal in their sexuality. And while no one is really offended any more by bad behavior, that doesn’t mean we can’t be outraged. In fact, I challenge you to name one thing about which someone, somewhere, is not outraged.
When Roman Polanski — who actually is offensive — was busted in Switzerland for his decades-old rape charge and was defended by some misguided Hollywood types (you know who you are, Whoopi), there were those who immediately tried to frame it as a right-versus-left story.
It might have worked, too, except that every liberal columnist in the country immediately tore into Polanski, meaning the outrage became nearly universal. And what fun is that?
But then came the David Letterman sextortion scandal — and the Roman Polanski story was quickly forgotten.
Letterman is different. You’d think that sex and extortion and the night of Letterman’s confessional — a night of political theater unlike any I’d ever seen — would be enough for one scandal.
But only if you fail to put it in context. What I mean is, the first comment on the first Letterman story I saw said simply this: “Karma.”
You know exactly what the poster was saying. This was Letterman’s punishment for all the Sarah Palin jokes. It was Letterman’s punishment for dumping on John McCain. It was Letterman’s punishment for his not- very-funny, mostly fawning interview with Barack Obama.
It was karma. And, as right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin put it, there was just a little schadenfreude at work. Yes, it was the whole power vocabulary package.
You don’t need a poll to know what’s going on here. Letterman chose sides, and the sides have parted ways.
Once, late-night comics didn’t choose sides. Once, of course, TV anchors didn’t choose sides either. Now we have Fox vs. MSNBC, Drudge vs. The Huffington Post, Bill O’Reilly vs. Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh vs. Jon Stewart.
Everyone takes a side. Once the great Letterman-Palin debate began, there was no going back. If Letterman was anti-Palin, he had to be anti-a-lot-of-other-things-too.
In Letterman’s late-late-night days, he was the hip thing to watch for people who roamed the night, or at least those who roamed the dial when everyone else was asleep.
But Letterman, now 62, gave up the hipness standard long ago to Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. It’s hard to be hip on network TV.
What Letterman was, though, was cynical — always cynical. He’s the cynic who didn’t have a heart of gold. He was the confirmed cynic to Jay Leno’s mid-Americanism, which will tell you why Leno beat him in the ratings. He was the cynic beloved by critics but never exactly embraced by Sarah Palin’s “real America.”
Tom Shales, the great Washington Post TV critic, wrote a column the other day saying we shouldn’t judge Letterman by the same standards we use to judge politicians, saying Letterman’s “the proverbial court jester, a clownish figure with a mandate to prick the powerful — not set himself up as a model of virtue.”
But I think Shales maybe misses the point. Letterman may prick the powerful — but some powerful are more easily pricked than others.
In his confessional last week, Letterman produced a heart-stopping eight minutes of (in his words) creepy admission of sex with staffers and creepy revelation of an extortion attempt. But what he didn’t do was apologize.
When he came back Monday, he went for laughs again — he spent the weekend, he said, raking hate mail — but he also said how sorry he was to have hurt his wife and staff.
But he didn’t apologize for being the 62-year-old boss who slept with women who worked for him, including at least one intern — the really creepy stuff, the kind that should turn feminists away.
But he’ll survive this. He’ll probably even thrive. The scandal that doesn’t kill you only makes your ratings stronger — and Letterman’s, by the way, are through the roof.
What I mean is, if Michelle Malkin says she doesn’t like him, what choice do I have but to watch?
Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.
