Michael Kelly Mort Kondracke Ch. Al Gore has accepted the challenge. George W. Bush hasn't responded yet, so Letterman is turning up the heat.
Letterman is entitled to have fun at the expense of politicians.
He's free to beat the guacamole out of the Texas governor or anybody else for that matter. Letterman could mock and ridicule endlessly without a single dissenting voice. The bucktoothed, overly ironic Hoosier could, night after night, say George Bush kicks puppies, eats kittens and likes to dress like Janet Reno in his spare time. Cut off the money and the only people free to talk about politics are the folks who control the media. In this example, if a candidate wants to buy a commercial denying that he's a puppy-kicker or simply to assert that he's for tax cuts, government officials would decide how many commercials he can buy, when he can buy them and where he can air them.