Through the fog of history, I found myself with a memory – stimulated by Bristol Palin’s peculiar success on Dancing with the Stars. 
It’s of a former celebrity daughter from my early life – Harry Truman‘s daughter Margaret. Truman was President from 1945 to 1953 [for me, 4 y/o to 12 y/o]. It was the time when movie-tone newsreels and radio were being replaced by grainy black and white t.v., and musical variety shows were the rage. Harry’s daughter was a very middle-weight singer who was plenty over-represented on these shows. I recall as a kid hearing her and wincing. But the crowning piece of this story is known from the "Washington Post" incident. After her opening musical debut in Washington, old "give ’em hell Harry" unloaded on the music reviewer, Paul Hume:
Who cares about Dancing with the Stars [though I did enjoy Tom Delay’s amazing melt-down]? And if Sarah runs for President, we’ll have to worry about the Palin pop-factor for real. But, for the moment, Bristol’s fate on reality[?] television pales in comparison to Margaret Truman…
Whatever else can be said for HST’s defensive threat of pugilistic vendetta, there was something fundamentally honest about it. One wishes that he’d taken Noel Coward’s admonition expressed in the tuneful “Don’t Put Your Daughter On the Stage Mrs. Worthington”…”now how can I make this clear that this is NOT a good idea”.
As the father of a daughter child, I’ve identified with HST on this one – some sumbitch lob insults at mine and I’m down with rearrangement of – at least – his face. I understood this impulse as well when Ms. Palin called Mr. Letterman out when he intimated something distasteful involving her daughter and the New York Yankees baseball club. Would that the Palins have receded into the dimness of time past as most of us anticipated with no small relief.
What Harry and Sarah don’t seem to have commanded insight enough to recognize is that their familial connections were/are famous only by their association and not on their own merits. Besides, everybody loves a clown.