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Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential also-ran Sarah Palin will not, repeat not, be appearing on David Letterman’s late night talk show.

That was just one round in a whizzing contest between the two that began last week when Letterman used a visit to New York by Palin as the subject of his nightly “Top Ten” list of topical gags.

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Palin, who as a vice-presidential candidate was criticized for spending thousands of dollars of somebody else’s money to snazz up her wardrobe, “Bought makeup from Bloomingdale’s to update her ’slutty flight attendant’ look,” Letterman said.

But the corker, which has sent Palin and fellow conservatives into a froth of righteous ire and message spinning, was this: “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

Palin was accompanied to the game by her daughter Willow, 14.

The governor quickly characterized Letterman’s joke as an endorsement of child-rape and encouragement for those who practice it, and accused the talk-show host of perversion. In a statement released to the press, she said:

“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands – that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’”

Letterman sort of apologized for the imbroglio the same night, saying the offending joke referred to Palin’s daughter, Bristol, now 18, who campaigned with her mother, unwed, visibly pregnant and accompanied by her now former fiancée. The Palin camp held her out as a feminist standard-bearer for single teenage mothers.

“Speaking of stupid human tricks, I stepped into traffic the other day,” Letterman began.

“We made some jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter … the girl who actually, excuse me, but was knocked up, is now 18 years old.”

But, glossing over the fact that it was Willow who was in New York, he repeated another of the Top Ten lines: “The hardest part of the trip was keeping Eliott Spitzer away from her daughter,” adding, “I’m surprised we haven’t heard from Eliott Spitzer either,” referring to the Democratic New York governor who resigned last year in a prostitution scandal.

“We do stuff all the time and our objective here is to get a laugh, and thank God we don’t have to, you know, go to the Hague before the world court to defend them.

“I would never, never make jokes about raping or having sex of any description with a 14-year-old girl. I mean, look at my record, it has never happened.

“Were the jokes in questionable taste? Of course they were. Do I regret having told them. Well, I think probably I do. But you know what? There are thousands of jokes I regret telling on this program.”

Letterman then invited Palin and her husband, Todd, to come on his show and work things out between them.

He got a response in another written statement:

“The Palins have no intention of providing a rating’s [sic] boost for David Letterman by appearing on the show. Plus, it would be wise to keep Willow away from David Letterman.”

When asked by the Today Show’s Matt Lauer if she was saying Letterman couldn’t be trusted around a 14-year-old girl, Palin replied: “Hey, take it however you want to take it.”

The goofy foofaraw finally ended, a week after it began, when Letterman unambiguously apologized during Monday’s show. The next morning, Palin accepted.

“It was kind of a coarse joke, there’s no getting around it,” he said. “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,” he said. “The joke, really, in and of itself, can’t be defended.

“As they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it’s not a very good joke.

“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.

“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.”

The next morning, Palin accepted Letterman’s mea culpa “on behalf of all young women, like my daughters, who hope men who ‘joke’ about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon evolve.”

This story was updated on Tuesday, June 16.

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• Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is McCain’s surprise VP pick – August 29, 2008
• Sarah’s thankful; the turkey not so much – November 21, 2008
• Sarah Palin withholds medical records – November 3, 2008
• Fey a dead ringer for small-town mayor from Alaska’s meth capital – September 16, 2008
• Sarah Palin finally releases medical summary – November 4, 2008
• Sarah Palin reads the New York Times – October 7, 2008
• Muck tracker – Joe Biden apologizes for Roberts joke – January 28, 2009
• Muck tracker – Sarah Palin is a grandmother – December 30, 2008
• Sarah Palin’s firing of public safety commissioner probed by lawmakers – September 3, 2008
• Jon Stewart’s teleprompter is working again – February 14, 2008