If you didn’t see CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman Monday night, you missed one of the most disgusting personal attacks under the guise of comedy that I’ve seen on cable television in a long time . . . and that’s saying something, considering how many personal attacks under the guise of comedy we see these days.

Letterman called former VP candidate Sarah Palin a slut, and joked about her 14-year-old daughter, Willow, being “knocked up” by a Yankees baseball player. Powerline has videos.

Letterman also made a hooker reference to Palin, suggesting she turned a trick for crack cocaine.

Let’s not forget that morning talk jock Don Imus was skewered for his comments about Rutgers basketball players being “nappy-headed hoes.” It basically wrecked his career (he’s bounced back somewhat, but televised syndication on the farm channel is a lot different than syndication on MSNBC . . . although, come to think of it, there might be as many people watching RFDTV these days as MSNBC).

The thing is, Imus should have been skewered over what he said. I said it then and still believe it today. His remarks were mean-spirited and uncalled for. Imus is a jerk.

Letterman is also a jerk. A disgusting jerk. His remarks about Palin’s “slutty flight attendant look” were every bit as bad as Imus’s remarks about the Rutgers players. Some will say that Palin is fair game because she’s a politician, while the Rutgers women were basketball players who never asked for that. I disagree. I’ve said before that we need to get rid of uncivil discourse in politics, which is why I despise Rush Limbaugh. Letterman has proven this week that he’s on the same level as Limbaugh (I’m not sure Limbaugh has ever called a woman a slut on the air, but I do recall him cracking jokes about Michael J. Fox’s medical condition, which was just as bad).

But Letterman’s slutty flight attendant remark is just the start of it. The joke on Palin’s daughter was far, far worse. Children are supposed to be off-limits. To crack a sex joke about a 14-year-old girl — to use the innocence of a child, basically, for your own agenda — is not funny. It’s sick. (Those coming to Letterman’s defense point out that he didn’t mention the daughter by name; he only said “Palin’s daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” But it’s been well-established that 14-year-old Willow was the only one of the Palin daughters to accompany her mother to the game.)

Let’s call a spade a spade: Letterman was joking about the rape of a 14-year-old girl. I don’t know what the law is in New York, but I can’t think of a state in the union where a man the age of Alex Rodriguez having sex with a 14-year-old wouldn’t be considered statutory rape. Even if he were talking about 18-year-old Bristol Palin, it would still have been a disgusting remark.

There are a lot of Republicans trying to make this political (and, to be sure, Dave is a Democrat who saves the brunt of his vile for right-minded targets). They say it’s an indication of the Democrats’ mean-spiritedness. Well, let’s save the righteous indignation. Republicans can be just as bad. Remember that it was none other than John McCain who cracked a joke about Chelsea Clinton being “so ugly” because her father was Janet Reno.

But Letterman’s remark was much worse than even McCain’s crack about the Clintons’ daughter. So why are we sitting here, 36 hours later, with no condemnation from the mainstream media? The blogosphere is alive with it, but there’s hardly a mention of it elsewhere. In fact, Politico had a story about the slutty flight attendant remark and completely ignored the crack about Palin’s daughter. CNN’s Larry King last night characterized it as “a feud,” saying that Letterman made a remark about Palin and she made a remark right back at him (Palin’s remark was that Letterman is “pathetic,” which seems a little generous; certainly, I couldn’t have been that reserved if someone made a similar remark about my child).

I don’t give a rip whether he’s a conservative or a liberal or whether you love or hate Sarah Palin. It takes a disgusting human being to make a joke about the statutory rape of a 14-year-old child in front of a couple million viewers. I guess I’d be bitter, too, if my ratings had slipped from the leading late night show on network TV to a tie for last in his time-slot and had been forced to take a pay cut to have my contract renewed. But David Letterman established himself long ago as a sexist pig. Now he’s shown that he’s a disgusting old entertainer with no integrity whatsoever.