Don't be fooled into thinking that Dave doesn't have a dog in this fight, even though he claimed that. Dave has been losing to Jay for years now, and if this tarnishes Jay's everyman persona to Joe America that means potentially more eyeballs on his show.

That plus the revenge factor makes Letterman hardly an unbiased observer, and makes these comments uncool in my opinion.

Actually Dave has talked about this on his show. He's made fun of Leno (through an impersionation) and he even offered advice on how to fix the mess. He basically suggested that they both be on the Tonight show, with Conan hosting and pull out Jay for a monogue/comedy routine segment, then send him away, because Leno sucks at everything else.

Leno beat Letterman in the ratings for 15 out of 17 years on The Tonight show. He has plenty of fans. And he did that on many nights WITHOUT a good lead-in. Conan just couldn't cut it on his shot at TTS and that's what did him in. NBC is making the decisions, not Leno. It IS a business.

Letterman is trashing Leno out of sour grapes and trying to divert the attention away from his own personal problems. Conan does deserve some of the blame. If he'd been as funny as he'd been on his later show, none of this would be happening.

Now you can lighten the print on this pro-Leno comment, too, Gallagher.

To Mike.
Who in his right mind thinks Leno is better than Dave.
Come on.

Theres you and some old people down in Florida.
Letterman is a legend.

Dave is a bitter old man who never was good enough (and still isn't) for the Tonight show. His ass was kicked by Leno and now he knows here comes Round II. Gee, a competitor shrilly takes on the guy who is better than he is . . . what a shocking surprise. Dave, fix your own insipid show, hit on a few more subordinates and then you can talk about values

Don't forget ABC was involved in all this - remember when Leno and Kimmel were on each other's shows on the same night, and it was thought ABC was trying to get him. The "keep Leno" part of all this came from that it seems - NBC didn't want to lose him to ABC and they came up with the "we'll find you another show" ploy. It was really similar to what they had done with Conan 5 years earlier, except the promise was a specific show- the Tonight Show. BTW -the best thing Letterman could say would be that he's looking forward to Leno coming back because he's easier to compete with.... Conan is just as creative as Letterman and I would imagine that has been a big concern over at CBS.

Not sure what you've been paying attention to but Dave didn't "finally weigh in", he's been destroying Jay and NBC every night since this happened. Check gawker for the daily clips, his evisceration of Dick Ebersol the other night was priceless.

Lame. Jay didn't say "don't blame conan for what's going on right now." He was referring to himself being fired in order to give Conan the Tonight show 5 years ago.

But I can understand why Dave would be bitter and want to continue to paint Jay as the bad guy in all this.

Um... I'll blame Conan. If his show was good, he'd still have it. Whether it's to your taste or not, ratings don't lie, and show business is still... business.

I have one thing to say to Dave - BRAVO!