The current big story regarding media decency standards is of course comedian David Letterman’s joke about one of Sarah Palin’s daughters having been impregnated during a recent trip to Yankee Stadium.

The joke was as unfunny as most of Letterman’s material, but there was a further problem. As Palin pointed out in a press statement, the only daughter who accompanied her to the Yankees game was fourteen years old. Hence Letterman’s joke, while grossly boorish and unamusing, was based on a premise of finding statutory rape funny if it happens to the child of a person who espouses liberty and opposes socialist elitism.

Letterman responded that he meant the girl’s older sister, Bristol, who is eighteen and recently gave birth to an illegitimate child. How such a family tragedy can be is a valid topic of humor Letterman did not say.

He did not have to say, of course, because it is assumed by the media that anything in the life of a proponent of liberty, such as Palin, is fair game for criticism, mockery, and open hatred, regardless of how vile, tasteless, and repugnant the slurs may be.

No longer even pretending to be a comedian, Letterman has openly transformed into a socialist hatchet man, truckling openly to President Obama while relentlessly attacking all proponents of real liberty. It is his right to do so if he chooses, of course, but it is also our right to record our disgust at his open personal decay into a repugnant hack.

Letterman’s latest offense against reason and human decency followed a recent article on the Playboy magazine website in which an author identified ten right-of-center women whom he would like to rape. He did not use the term rape, preferring the vulgar euphemism hate-f-ck. How demure of him.

Clearly these lovely events and the many other of the like in recent years exemplify an unutterably foul double standard practiced by the American media, in which any imaginable offense against conservatives and classical liberals is acceptable while even a single peep of criticism from the right brings a firestorm of open hatred and furious attempts at both character assassination and career destruction.

Those who prefer liberty instead of coercive socialism and government-imposed social transformation are shouted down without any chance of being heard in response.

From Palin herself to Carrie Prejean, the victims of this double standard are multitudinous.

The greatest victim, however, is the American public, which is denied an opportunity for a fair hearing of the important issues of the day and is continuously menaced with the threat that any opposition to the transformational socialist juggernaut is liable to bring instant destruction.

—S. T. Karnick