It's all about bread and circuses.
Aside from the legal ramifications the whole Letterman episode is a stark reminder of how sick and degenerate our society has become when a man makes jokes about his serial affairs with employees on national TV and his audience laughs and applauds him. It reminds me of some things I read in Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall...”
You couldn’t have put it better. This is the audience both in the studio and at home that gives him the ratings that makes him earn $32m a year and then use his perch to root for 0 and viciously lambaste Palin and her family. This is the worst piece of public TV scum and and if CBS has an ounce of respect for its audience would fire him.