Tonight, he blew the doors wide open.
Colbert was the featured speaker at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. It's supposedly that time when the lion lays down with the lamb, i.e. the Administration shows up for some comedic tweaking by the press or their stand-up surrogates, usually with a sense of ultimate fraternity behind it all.
Previous event controversies have included the video made by the White House of Bush searching high and low for WMDs in his office (some thought it inappropriate considering how many U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens have died for that lie, but maybe those dead & wounded and their families just don't know how to take a joke) and Don Imus saying something off-color.
Big whoop.
Colbert brought his rightwing demigod to the podium and didn't soften any of the blows. The room was noticeably tense and silent for the most part, and George & Laura seemed unsmiling at the end and eager to get away.
Crooks and Liars has the second half of the C-SPAN feed, but here are some choice lines:
The greatest thing about this man is that he is steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday - no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man's beliefs never will.
Guys like us - we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that people are thinking in 'reality'. And 'reality' has a well known liberal bias.
Fox News gives you both sides of every story, the President's side and the Vice President's side.
Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the Chocolate City... Mayor Nagin, I'd like to welcome you to Washington D.C., the Chocolate City with a marshmallow center... and a graham cracker crust of corruption.
The government that governs best is the government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.
This Administration is not sinking. This Administration is soaring. If anything they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.
There's a list of most of the scandals Colbert referenced here in TrueBlueMajority's diary on Daily Kos.
As Colbert would say while in character on his show: that man has "muchos huevos grandes", laying down the sharpest satire imaginable just five feet away from George Bush, right in the outlaw President's face.
Hail to the Chief.
As of tonight, the Chief is Colbert.
2 comments:
I didn't get a chance to see it on c-span; first read the transcript Sunday morning and then watched the last half in a postage-stamp-sized window at C&L. I'm looking forward to seeing the whole thing as it aired, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. It doesn't seem to be in much rotation on c-span.
The question that interests me is exactly who the intended audience was. The baffled press corps' uncomfortable silence shows that they were not the audience; they were just as much Colbert's foil as Bush himself was. Their inability to laugh at the elephant-in-the-room truths he was poking fun at just made it that much funnier. But neither did it strike me that he was aiming for his usual Standard Cable audience.
I kind of feel like this was meant for an audience who is not around yet. It's like a timecapsule, which will be appreciated by future generations much more than today's. One day people will watch it as we watch Dr. Strangelove, as a memorial to one of the temporary insanities our country has a tendency to fall into at times of insecurity. To watch Dr. Strangelove today is not just to be struck by the insanity of the time, but also to be reassured that many at the time recognized the insanity, and we as a country were able to recover from it. I suspect that Colbert's presentation will one day be appreciated from that same perspective. This is insane, he will have told us us, but this, too, shall pass.
I happened to rewatch Sunday night Colbert's interview with Bill Kristol. When it aired on Thursday the big deal Colbert made of thanking Kristol for all his help with his press corps presentation, for writing his speech and directing and editing the film clip at the end, didn't make sense to me. Now it makes much more sense, and is pretty damned funny in itself.
-T
That's an interesting thought, re: Colbert's performance as time capsule material. I just think he's found an ingenious, non-shrill, way to go completely critical, maybe how Jonathan Swift did with "Gulliver's Travels" or Lewis Carrol with "Alice in Wonderland".
What makes Colbert such a high-wire act is that he's playing a double game. You kind of listen knowing that he's doing satire, and sort of reverese the comments in your mind; the ultimate irony entertainer in our age of ironic comedy.
I find it a little like watching "Memento" where the scenes are arranged in reverse order. The plants are all actually results and vice versa.
Can make a person go nuts to follow!
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