Don’t tell me that these guy are beyond feeling the heat. Seems that the pressure readers of this and other blogs is putting on CBS over David Letterman’s careless slander of Sarah Palin and her daughters is working.

“David Letterman is making a full-throated apology for his controversial joke about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter.

During a taping of tonight’s edition of his CBS “Late Show,” Letterman went much further than his last explanation of the joke, in which he quipped that a baseball player had “knocked up” Palin’s daughter.

“I told a bad joke,” Letterman said. “I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception. And since it was a joke I told, I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke.”

Letterman thought he was cracking wise about Palin’s 18-year-old, Bristol, who last year served as a campaign surrogate for her mom’s effort to become vice-president. But the Palins took it as a jab at their 14-year-old, and reacted with sharp criticism of Letterman.

Letterman offered a semi-apology last week, but that was greeted with even more criticism from Palin partisans. With word of an anti-Letterman protest scheduled for tomorrow, Letterman decided to try to clear the air once more and put the matter behind him.”

Not just “partisans” but decent Americans everywhere. In fact if it didn’t bother Mr. Adalian that says boatloads about his morality.

Nevertheless, here’s Letterman’s apology.

“”All right, here – I’ve been thinking about this situation with Governor Palin and her family now for about a week – it was a week ago tonight, and maybe you know about it, maybe you don’t know about it. But there was a joke that I told, and I thought I was telling it about the older daughter being at Yankee Stadium. And it was kind of a coarse joke. There’s no getting around it, but I never thought it was anybody other than the older daughter, and before the show, I checked to make sure in fact that she is of legal age, 18. Yeah. But the joke really, in and of itself, can’t be defended. The next day, people are outraged. They’re angry at me because they said, ‘How could you make a lousy joke like that about the 14-year-old girl who was at the ball game?’ And I had, honestly, no idea that the 14-year-old girl, I had no idea that anybody was at the ball game except the Governor and I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Giuliani…And I really should have made the joke about Rudy…” (audience applauds) “But I didn’t, and now people are getting angry and they’re saying, ‘Well, how can you say something like that about a 14-year-old girl, and does that make you feel good to make those horrible jokes about a kid who’s completely innocent, minding her own business,’ and, turns out, she was at the ball game. I had no idea she was there. So she’s now at the ball game and people think that I made the joke about her. And, but still, I’m wondering, ‘Well, what can I do to help people understand that I would never make a joke like this?’ I’ve never made jokes like this as long as we’ve been on the air, 30 long years, and you can’t really be doing jokes like that. And I understand, of course, why people are upset. I would be upset myself.

“And then I was watching the Jim Lehrer ‘Newshour’ – this commentator, the columnist Mark Shields, was talking about how I had made this indefensible joke about the 14-year-old girl, and I thought, ‘Oh, boy, now I’m beginning to understand what the problem is here. It’s the perception rather than the intent.’ It doesn’t make any difference what my intent was, it’s the perception. And, as they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s not a very good joke. And I’m certainly – ” (audience applause) “- thank you. Well, my responsibility – I take full blame for that. I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception. And since it was a joke I told, I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke. It’s not your fault that it was misunderstood, it’s my fault. That it was misunderstood.” (audience applauds) “Thank you. So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I’m sorry about it and I’ll try to do better in the future. Thank you very much.” (audience applause)”

Had he apologized like this the first time it would have been sufficient. But that it took this long still makes it nearly unacceptable at this point. Subsequently I believe that David Letterman should be at the least suspended, but perferably fired from CBS.

Therefore the pressure to do so will continue. Letterman needs to be made an example of what happens when a celebrity uses that status to slander and harm. Just as Don Imus and others before an after him, there needs to be consequences.

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