WHAT'S WRONG WITH "DANCING WITH THE STARS"?

ABC's "DWTS," TV's top-rated show, kicked out 76-year-old Florence Henderson on Tuesday night while "saving" Bristol Palin and propelling the former Alaska governor's single-mom daughter into Week 6 of the season. The show's three judges had scored Bristol lowest in Monday night's competition with a dismal score of 18. Supposedly, viewers had made up for that with call-ins and texts in the young woman's favor. So out went Henderson, a musical-comedy pro and the beloved mom on old-time TV's "The Brady Bunch," even though her somewhat stiff dancing has improved and she is no worse on the floor than the handsome, 6-foot-7-inch former Laker, Rick Fox.

Maybe the producers are telling the truth about the combined votes of the judges and the millions of viewers that produced the good news for Palin and the bad news for Henderson.

Or maybe, and this is simply my opinion, they aren't. In either case, how are we to know? There is no real accountability. The producers don't give us any numbers from the public. It could be that decisions on whom to keep or discard are insider decisions, based on demographics, politics and, of course, ratings. The producers are acting entirely arbitrarily in asking us to trust them for an honest count. But they risk the show's credibility, which -- and this is merely my opinion -- could be on a par with that of one of Hamid Karzai's Afghanistan elections, for all I know.

It's not hard to figure why the producers would want to keep Palin in, as awkward as she is (the poor, game, over-her-head thing) on the dance floor. She's in the youthful demographic that advertisers covet. By contrast, advertisers stupidly figure that nobody in their 70s watching the show, Henderson's demographic, ever buys anything. (Disregarding the age-old fact that older people have a lot more money than teenagers.)

Another motive might well be the mixture of politics and ratings. Sarah Palin has a huge, worshipful Tea Party following. Why else would the producers have cast Bristol Palin in the first place? Keeping that big potential audience segment of extreme conservatives on board as long as possible (while building network goodwill with these knee-jerk media-haters) is clearly an appealing course for ABC and the show's runners.

All in all, it appears that Bristol Palin would have to go into a fainting collapse from the first beat to disappear from "Dancing With the Stars." But as the weeks go on, the cynicism about her survival is sure to grow.