Mmm, Stephen

I think it's going to take a distance of time, maybe three months, maybe a year, maybe more before Stephen Colbert's performance at last Saturday night's White House Correspondent's dinner is seen in true historical perspective as the turning point for some many different threads.

First off, we'll never look at Stephen the same way again. It's the turning point of his career, a show less than a year old and suddenly he's being covered (finally, if begrudgingly) by The New York Times. Not bad for a guy who couldn't support his family on his comedy career just before the turn of the century

It's a brilliant career move for the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Public interest in the stupid goddamned dinner is at an all-time high, and I'll bet they can sell the television rights (maybe extended DVD deal as well?) to a major network next year, fuck those public access rubes at C-SPAN. We're talking long green.

It's the turning point for speaking truth to power, to the most insulated President in living memory. After all those staged campaign and Social Security events with pre-screen, choreographed crowds or soldiers, here's someone who got through the filter -- the George Bush reverse filter that keeps all news that doesn't match The Decider's lethal obstinacy.

And I think it's maybe a turning point in how the public views the President with regards to his power, his self-vaunted "political capital". The way you really bring someone down in the eyes of others is ridicule; witness the A-bombing of Howard Dean after his "scream" was e.q.'ed to remove the crowd and played enough to bury any mainstream thought of taking him seriously. It happened to Nixon as well.

Once you're President fool, there's no coming back. Bush will always have at least a 29% floor in popularity (it's the number Nixon hit when he looked the most malignantly guilty) but even that last 3% to 5% of Americans can't take seriously except as a disaster anymore.

On tonight's show Colbert re-ran the pre-recorded video with which he concluded his Dinner presentation. It begins as Colbert's audition tape for the job of Press Secretary (and why not -- it was awarded last week to a Fox News commentator, Tony Snow), answering questions (stolen from actual press gaggles) on the impending Karl Rove criminal investigations. How brutal must that be for Bush and Rover to be reminded of on an ostensible party night.

Then, more fun for all the President's men, wife and other women, it turns to Iraq, specifically the last of specific reason why we're over there like Misery Claus. First it's with cut-in clips of five-decade White House journalist Helen Thomas from when she was actually asking George Bush himself, then in obviously staged footage of her stalking Colbert who's running away in sheer terror of having to definitely answer the question of, "Why did we go to war?"

Behind the mask of "Stephen Colbert" Colbert was just laughing at the President, as so many of us have done these past six years when not rending garments, in his face.

Well, who knows what Bush feels. If someone were rubbing my face in the most colossal, maybe catastrophic errors of my life, I'd be mortified. Colbert even parodied that famous moment on Bush's weak and pathetic China tour when he tried to leave and found the door locked.

Perversely, I don't think anything gets through to this guy. I mean, check out the photo in the NY Times article. With Colbert in rare form, and Bush right under him with that same smug expression he gets whenever having to endure something that doesn't agree with his underdeveloped dendrites.

Save it to your hard drive, because I get a sense off that photo like it's already a phenomenal historical document that will define this era. Colbert's performance that night is certainly a landmark in the history of comedy, perhaps the biggest stake in the ground since maybe since Richard Pryor got censored by NBC.

So while some so-called serious journalists and square old politicians in D.C. try to shed the still stinging barbs by acting like entertainment critics and claiming Colbert got a chilly reception because he somehow wasn't funny, remember that this moment is bigger than any of them, and Colbert will be remembered long after they have all faded out.