I find international press attempts to explain American cultural items bemusing.  Case in point: David Letterman.

Aussies explain two lingering items.: Under the terms of his contract, Letterman’s quaintly named company Worldwide Pants leases airtime on CBS, so he is not an employee.
The network is believed to be concerned about some sections of its audience with puritanical views.

From Great Britain, and the BBC: How do you relate Letterman to a British audience?:

Some suggested Letterman was less irreverent at 2230 than he had been at 2330, for all his pointedly sarcastic, sometimes prickly brand of humour.
Yet that did not stop him incurring the wrath of a Colombian beauty queen in 2001 whom he suggested had a talent for ingesting heroin balloons.

Not the first thing that pops to my mind in the history of Letterman’s programs.  OR, from the Telegraph, explaining what it is this “late night talk show“, and why it holds any sphere in American pop culture, as against Oprah:

Sharp and pesky, Letterman captures something of the essence of the prevailing American mindset. In a sense, his show, like Oprah Winfrey’s, has helped to fashion the mood of forgiveness-for-all-things of which he is now the beneficiary. Celebrities and politicians sit beside his desk to get things off their chests, but until last week no guest – let alone the host himself – had ever arrived at the studio straight from giving evidence before a grand jury.

And to further describe American geography:
The son of working-class Midwesterners, he was raised in a dreary suburb of Indianapolis – the middle child between two sisters. His father ran a flower shop, and his mother made the fried bologna sandwiches which he still drools over on air. Like many who have made it from America’s sparse heartlands, he appears to harbour a sense of irreducible farm-belt emptiness.

………………………….
There have been certain “landmarks” in the rises and slides of the various late night talk shows.  The history of Jay Leno is that he was being beaten to a pulp by Letterman.  And Jay Leno was a bit lost at sea, until he did a week in New York in a smaller more “comedy club” venue, which refocused his show, and started a march upwards in the ratings.  He cemented a climb above appeared on Jay Leno’s first to promote whatever movie he was promoting at the time of his prostitution bust.  Conan O’brien was getting hammered at his new show, but he found his confidence and bearing when Letterman appeared on his show as a guest.  Or something.

Five years ago, NBC decided they needed to lock in Conan O’brien, so they planned for the future with him as Tonight Show host.  Watching their ratings fall in prime-time, they just “re-invented” television, as it proceeds in an era of “transition” with arbitrary lines falling, by giving him the 10 o’clock hour — cheap to produce, and nothing else was working for them.  The effect was that Letterman was now newly beating The Tonight Show in the ratings.  Until last week, NBC still could hold on to “winning the (marketing friendly) young demographic”.  But then, Letterman’s ratings rose last week to “the highest margin over The Tonight Show since the 1994 Winter Olympics”.
I suppose the “biggest loser” Letterman’s scandal was Conan O’brien, who’ll continue to be beaten badly in the ratings.  Why, this is Letterman’s Hugh Grant Moment!  And, by the time, Letterman retires from Show Business, who knows what the structure of television will be like?

There is one thing that bothers me, and puzzles me a bit, about Letterman: since when is he a partisan figure?  Is it just Palin, or was there something that justifies anything at all with a strong label?  I can’t help but think that’s mostly a signifier against the partisanship of the partisan detractors.
One question that pops to my mind about the would be extortionist, suggested by Letterman himself in his monolouge: Who wants to pay eight dollars to watch a movie about David Letterman having sex?

The “rule for thee but not for me” is the expression that comes to mind with regard to the clamor against Alan Grayson.  Something else popped into mind here.  Kevin Phillips, circa 1975:

Conservative ideolouge Kevin Phillips argues that in 1972, for the first time in recent history, a Republican got a majority of Catholic and blue collar workers, plus the Wallace following.  This is the authentic conservative majority, Mr. Phillips maintains, which President Ford ignores. […]
This line of reasoning sees conservatives as not just upper class or Orange County, Cali voters, but the “productive” people who resent school busing, high taxes, inflation, criminality, the permissive and irreligious, and “non-producers.”

The author of “The Emerging Republican Majority”, who has since sometime in the middle of the Reagan Administration come to wearily take his own work back, made the appeal to aggrieved white working class / blue collar workers by directing their animus at dirty do-nothing (non-productive) hippies and welfare teats.  This came to mind upon hearing this bit of demagoguery, and self-contained hypocrisy.

“[Reference that stupid Newsweek cover, Newsweek by definition “leftist”] It’s the American Left who wants you to die.  They want you to die in the womb, and they want you to die when you’re no longer productive toward the end of your life.  It’s the Democrat Party that’s obsessed with your death.”

One disclaimer, of sorts: Rick Santorum, who follows the likes of Mike Gravels as entertaining a presidential bid after having been shellacked out of a Senate seat, says that his party needs to move beyond talk show hosts.  Surely and whole-heartedly true, but as they are not there yet, when discussing the Republican Party right now, you have to discuss these radio show hosts.  Then again, there we get back to the problem posed by Alan Grayson’s intemperate problem: they have no health care policy, meaning its a defacto support of the status quo, and that is the policy of the Health Care Insurance industry as it knocks people off its rolls with ease in pursuit of the bottom line.

This is a curious little analysis.

After the Republicans got thrashed in the 1964 elections, a GOP senator told columnist Joe Alsop, “That damn Lyndon Johnson hasn’t just grabbed the middle of the road. He’s a bit to the right of center, as well as a bit to the left of center. And with Johnson hogging the whole road — right, left and center — where the devil can we go except into the ditch?”

Well put. So they tried to steer clear of that ditch by claiming what little they could of the center. Republican Senate Whip Tom Kuchel, a moderate, had refused to endorse Barry Goldwater in the fall, and some more conservative members of the caucus called for his ouster. Alsop wrote that California’s “Goldwaterites and John Birch Society members” were clamoring for his head, treating him “as though he were Chief Justice Earl Warren.”

Sure, but the Center could not hold.  I have actually been thinking a bit about Obama with regard to the 1960s and Kennedy / Johnson, interesting because conservative detractors lob him at Carter and liberal detractors lobby some of their animus of Clinton at him.  John Kennedy’s a sort of case of where Obama is right now.  The right-wing Loons were out in full force at the time.  It would take until the end of the decade for the Left-wing Loons to occupy that territory.  In the meantime, we went from the inspiring visage of Kennedy, conciliating through some small bore reforms and tending to straddle something of a middle course in some areas.  Foreign policy wise always brings up that enigma: where was Kennedy heading with Vietnam?  It may be a product of the martrydom that encases what we want to see in him, but the American University speech is frequently viewed as the evidence that this Cold War hawk was, chastined by the Cuban Missile Crisis, moving toward policy thinking that wouldn’t have escalated Vietnam.  So we are today with Obama equivicating on Afghanistan, and in another manner Iraq.  Those dates of decision came and went headed by Johnson, who escalated everything on Kennedy’s plate — for good and bad: escalated civil rights, escalated small bore welfare programs into a “War on Poverty”, and escalated the advisors in Vietnam to that damned war. 

The consensus was a smoldering apparatus over looming political changes.  The Center could not hold.  When confronting the issues of the day, consensi have to be broken apart eventually, and there is no “party hogging the left, center, and right”.  A date with late Johnson era discontent is in the wings unless Obama deals with his host of problems.

Unfortunately for me, I never put this thought online and in writing before someone rolled it to dailykos, but in regards to one Senator whose Center is not holding, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas:  

An emailer has a good theory to explain Blanche Lincoln’s inexplicable behavior, voting against the public option which is extremely popular in her state:
If you were a seriously endangered Arkansas senator, you’d be playing the same game.  It’s simple. She wants a job after she leaves office.
Makes sense. K Street could be lucrative. This is her job audition.

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