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Big Things Said Through Humor - Colbert Rips Bush
Please keep this thread up to PDD standards (which have dropped lately). If you want free reign check out the COR thread.
At the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner, apparently White House A.P. Correspondant Mark Smith pulled some strings to have the closing speech given by Stephen Colbert of The Daily Show and Colbert Report - with President Bush right by his side!
Before we get into Colbert's speech; the President had a comedy number of his own. In a brilliant move, he brought in a Bush-impersonator and the two of them did an act side by side. They poked fun at everything from Bush's low approval rating to Vice President Dick Cheney shooting a man in the face. You can get video of them here:
ABC News
Then came Colbert, who stole the stage. Colbert was merciless, he attacked Bush, the administration, the war, and the media. Unfortunately, because Colbert did not spare the media - conservative or liberal parts - you won't find much coverage of his speech. In fact I had trouble finding articles about it in the mainstream outlets and had to resort to blogs.
Heres the one that was posted in COR
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| Stephen Colbert: Buried by Truthiness May 01, 2006 Amrita Rajan If you can't wait for the videos of the Colbert roast, they are at the bottom of this fine article. Right about now, Mark Smith, the White House Correspondents Association's outgoing president is probably thinking some very unkind thoughts about his successor Steve Scully and it all has to do with the most under reported story of the weekend - Stephen Colbert's starring turn as the "featured entertainment" at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. If you've never heard of this event at all, it's because it's televised on C-Span. Unless you're a political junkie, you probably know the re-run dates of Xena better than where to find C-Span on your cable menu. However, you may have heard of the many gentle funnies spawned at this dinner - last year, Laura Bush hit the headlines after she described herself as a Desperate Housewife and poked fun at her husband's inability to pronounce the word "nuclear" at this same occasion while her husband chuckled genially from the dais. This year, the President stood up to speak - right next to his TV doppelganger Steve Bridges. Real Bush and Fake Bush did a funny ha-ha little routine where they once again made fun of Real Bush's continuing inability to pronounce the word "nuclear". Well, that explains the First Lady's obsession with education - it must be frustrating when your grown husband can't learn one word in a whole year. Finally, amidst much applause and hilarity, the President and his TV Twin wound up their act and sat down. Meanwhile, an unseen commentator (probably under orders from Steve Scully, who happens to work for C-Span) informed the audience at home that this dinner is famous not for its "featured entertainment" but for its flip Presidential addresses and the gathering of the illustrious from the world of journalism - and Hollywood, I noticed. But then, George Clooney is very hard not to notice, not to mention James Denton. Also in the crowd were Alex Trebek, Ludacris, Ben Rothlisberger and Laurence Fishburne. A little something for everyone. Then Mark Smith got up to introduce Stephen Colbert. While he'd mentioned before that he was not too familiar with Colbert's work, he now explained that his unfamiliarity extended to the fact that his company, Associated Press, had been identified as a "Threat to America" on Colbert's show. Why? It failed to attribute the genesis of the word "truthiness" to Colbert. At this point you know two things - a) Mark Smith is a hermit and b) Mark Smith has no idea what lies in store for him. A part of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show fake news circuit, Colbert hams it up four nights a week on The Colbert Report as a fact-hating, bear-loathing, liberal-despising, megalomaniac of a TV pundit. On Saturday night, he chose to remain in character as he expressed his love for the president with whom, he said, he had a lot in common. "We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol," he explained. "We're not members of the 'fact-inista'. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true. But that's because you looked it up in a book." A little later he offered a twist on what he calls his "neo-neocon" beliefs - "I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq." Jaws dropped and the smile slowly slid off the President's face as the room laughed a bit uncomfortably. They didn't show Mark Smith's face but I think that's because he was hiding under the table. Colbert went on, "I believe in this president. Now, I know there's some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ''reality.' And reality has a well-known liberal bias." By this time, the crowd nearest the President had apparently noticed that the leader of the free world didn't find his admirer nearly as funny or charming as his doppelganger referring to his wife as "caliente". The air grew thicker and the chuckles fainter even as Colbert calmly forged ahead on other topics, making this the one must-see moment in C-Span history. "Fox News," Colbert then pointed out. "Gives you both sides of every story, the President's side and the Vice President's side." But he was disappointed in the rest of them. "Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions, he's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction." George Clooney must have laughed heartily but he and Helen Thomas were probably the only two who did. The rest of the room decided to crawl into the valley of depression the President was by then inhabiting. Laura Bush, meanwhile, creditably portrayed Medusa. Alas for her, she was unable to turn Colbert into stone as he then acknowledged the great big elephant in the room. "Joe Wilson is here, the most famous husband since Desi Arnez. And of course he brought along his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Oh, my god! Oh, what have I said. I am sorry, Mr. President, I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife, Joe Wilson's wife." Had it been any other network, the camera would then have cut to Karl Rove's face. However, Steve Scully was probably standing with a knife at the cameraman's throat by then so all we saw was Valerie Plame throwing her head back to laugh. Colbert wound up his piece with an 'audition' tape he'd made for the post of Press Secretary. Let's just say it made Scott McClellan look good by comparison. Or it would have if it hadn't been busy pillorying him. Finally, the tape ended...with Colbert screaming in horror as he falls prey to a beady eyed Helen Thomas on a quest for the truth and nothing but. And you could almost feel the tension snap as the evening drew to a close. The President perfunctorily shook hands and muttered something (Colbert says he said "Good job!") before scuttling out the door with his wife, who merely inclined her head when Colbert paused by her chair. A phalanx of official types gathered on the opposite side of the dais to huddle and confer even as Colbert laughed and talked to members of the audience - from the look of things he was accepting compliments rather than spitballs and brick bats. As C-Span began to once more air the arrivals and departures of various guests - Helen Thomas delightfully mugging for the cameras, Valerie Plame looking like what every Bond girl wants to be, and George Clooney lost in a sea of women - I sat back on my couch and picked up my jaw from the floor. I mean, the jokes weren't that funny - they were the kind that make you grin more than hold on to your stomach and the faithful will notice that some of the material was recycled from the show. But in a world obsessed with adapting oneself to the audience in a vain attempt to be loved by more and more people, Stephen Colbert stuck to his fake-pundit guns. He didn't pull his punches, he wasn't intimidated by a milieu that was far different from his own (or if he was, he kept it to himself) and he was exactly who he is on his show. Put in a room with the President of the United States, administration officials, lawmakers and the men and women who bring you news of them, Stephen Colbert did something that should make every American proud. He exercised the rights given to him by the Constitution of his country to speak his mind and to speak it freely even in the face of power. In those minutes I was reminded that in this country, in these United States, the citizen retains the ultimate power. It is the same feeling I get every election year in India when the TV cameras make their labored way to places that the rest of us frequently forget in the years between one poll and another. And I see the stubborn look on some man's face, a man who otherwise feels himself powerless in the hands of fate, and it is written clearly that on this one occasion he is the captain of his ship. And I am reminded that democracy is not the rhetorical word that it so often seems. Yet, even in America, in this bastion of people's power, actions such as Colbert's are all too rare and can end in punishment - even if it is delivered with kid gloves rather than the crudity that one is accustomed to in other parts of the world. But the point remains that given an opportunity to exhibit truthiness, he took it and how. Thank you, Stephen Colbert and may your tribe increase... or at least outsource. http://desicritics.org/2006/05/01/044824.php
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Your thread topic looks a lot like this one. It's true though, your threads are more thorough and thus more attractive to the reader. And it's because of that that you shouldn't delete. 
Anyway, on topic, it was a good speech, although he had trouble setting up a joke. But that can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is the face Bush had towards the end of Colbert's number. He can't take a joke. Or perhaps he can't take the truth, even if it's going along with humor.
Bush is just like a litle kid. He wants people to laugh at his poor jokes but he can't appreciate the talent of Colbert. It's a shame really.
Also, I hope that this post lives up to the sacred standards of the PDD. If not, giving me a chance to edit will be a good act of encouragement.
Colbert sucked. what truth? Colbert's M.O. (not unlike Stewart's and most political humorists) is to give you half of the truth , sans context, and infer the humor from that.
gotta love CSPAN's style of coverage though.
btw i'm a fan of the Colbert Report. and some of his jokes were pretty funny. he didn't suck that bad.
a quote from Allah Pundit
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| Originally said by AllahPundit In Colbert�s defense, he might not have been playing for laughs. The dissident posture is very important to our friends on the left; if SC had kept things light and wasted his opportunity to speak �truth� to power, they�d have crucified him for it. As it is, the moonbats will be building statues of him tomorrow. To paraphrase another delusional comedian who wasn�t as funny as he thought he was, better to be Kos for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime. |
Third thread in the PDD covering this topic. Sure you also *read* in here Josh?
Anyway, the US press may officially *have* the freedom to write and publish whatever they want, but they have surely proven themselves again to not *do* so. Guess Colbert's point on the press was bitingly accurate - more so even than the ones on the president.
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| Originally posted by trancaholic Third thread in the PDD covering this topic. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo what? |
those don't count. they suck
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| Originally posted by Q5echo Colbert sucked. what truth? Colbert's M.O. (not unlike Stewart's and most political humorists) is to give you half of the truth , sans context, and infer the humor from that. gotta love CSPAN's style of coverage though. btw i'm a fan of the Colbert Report. and some of his jokes were pretty funny. he didn't suck that bad. a quote from Allah Pundit |
Why they weren't laughing/hope he is right:
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| If you want to see the difference between real political satire and the cheap imitation stuff, watch (or read) Stephen Colbert's merciless skewering of the Cheney administration and its media lapdogs, then go fork over your $10 and see the movie American Dreamz, which purports to do the same thing. I've done both, although in the reverse order, and I found the contrast between the two rather telling, particularly the audience reaction. (In the case of American Dreamz, I'm talking about the reaction of the moviegoing public and the critics, since the theatre where I saw it was basically devoid of life -- as opposed to Colbert's audience at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, which was basically devoid of intelligent life.) Atrios's take on American Dreamz was that the makers didn't have enough courage to give it real teeth, and that's about right, although it might have been more a case of wanting it to have just enough bite to attract a blue state demographic, without drifting into full-fledged Michael Moore territory. The movie wants to be safely anti-Bush, just as it wants to bash the entertainment industry, but not enough to make anyone in Hollywood actually take offense. The results tend to be both grating and feeble. The movie self-consciously adopts some of the annoying mannerisms of a '60s sitcom, with Dennis Quaid playing his George W. Bush lookalike as the standard male lead -- the genial but bumbling middle-aged white guy (think Samatha's husband in Bewitched) who means well but constantly ends up being manipulated by others. Even the heavy -- William Dafoe's Cheney-Rove hybrid -- is just a stereotypical sitcom boss, the neurotic but harmless control freak whose hairbrained power schemes are always doomed to self-destruct. The Cheney regime definitely has its sitcom moments, but the problem with American Dreamz is that it treats its political characters like it treats the schemers and dreamers in its TV wasteland -- as essentially sympathetic characters. They may be mindless, shallow and cruel (or, in the case of Hugh Grant's Simon Cowell clone, sociopathic monsters without a trace of human empathy) but American Dreamz. wants us to know they're still just people, darn it, and at the end of the day, lovable in their own wacky way. Even the terrorists in the movie are, deep down inside, supposed to be just like us -- celebrity-obsessed materialists with the attention span of gnats. By the finale, when the suicide bomber contestant who's had a change of heart commiserates with the president over the seeming intractability of all those Middle East hatreds, I felt like I was back at Disneyland, listening to all those folk dolls singing "it's a small world after all." This is schmaltz, not satire. It's no great surprise, then, that American Dreamz has come and will soon go without much critical or political reaction of any kind -- not even from the professional hysterics of the Michelle Malkin right. Which you definitely can't say about about Stephen Colbert's gig at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Colbert's routine was designed to draw blood -- as good political satire should. It seemed obvious, at least to me, that he didn't just despise his audience, he hated it. While that hardly merits comment in Left Blogostan, White House elites clearly aren't used to having such contempt thrown in their faces at one of their most cherished self-congratulatory events. So it's no surprise the scribes have tried hard to expunge it from the semi-official record -- as Peter Daou and Chris Durang have already noted. Colbert used satire the way it's used in more openly authoritarian societies: as a political weapon, a device for raising issues that can't be addressed directly. He dragged out all the unmentionables -- the Iraq lies, the secret prisons, the illegal spying, the neutered stupidity of the lapdog press -- and made it pretty clear that he wasn't really laughing at them, much less with them. It may have been comedy, but it also sounded like a bill of indictment, and everybody understood the charges. If things were going well, if Bush's approval ratings were north of 60%, gas was 80 cents a gallon and the war was being won, I suspect Colbert would have gotten a different reception. His audience could have pretended to be amused -- in that smug, patronizing way we all remember from the neocon glory days. But we're long past the point where the Cheneyites and their journalistic flunkies are willing to suffer such barbs with good humor. The regime's legal and political troubles are too serious, the wounds too open and too deep for the gang to smile while somebody like Colbert gleefully jabs a finger into them. Colbert's real sin wasn't lese majesty, it was inserting a brief moment of honesty into an event based upon a lie -- one considered socially necessary by the political powers that be, but still, a lie. Like its upscale sibling, the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the White House Correspondents dinner is a ritual designed, at least implicitly, to showcase the underlying unity of our Beltway elites. It's supposed to demonstrate that no matter how ferocious their battles may appear on the surface, political opponents can still gather in the same room and break bread, with the corporate media acting as the properly neutral host. It's a relic of the good old days of centrism and bipartisan log rolling ("the end of ideology"), visible proof that in the American system, there may be enemies, but there are no mortal enemies. And so last night we had Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame sitting at one table, Karl Rove at another, and no knives were drawn. The light entertainment at these events is also supposed to reflect the same spirit of forced good cheer, to the point where even matters of deadly seriousness --� things that in other countries might cause governments to fall -- are treated like inside jokes, as with Shrub's looking-for-the-missing-WMDs-under-the-couch routine. Ha ha ha. We're all friends here! The underlying message, never stated or even acknowledged, is that there are no disputes that can't be resolved within the cozy confines of our "democratic" (oligarchic) system. Friends don't send friends to jail -- or smash their presses or abolish their political parties or line them up against the wall and shoot them. The problem is that the tissue of this particular lie has been eroding ever since the Clinton impeachment, if not before, and is now worn exceedingly thin. It's becoming harder and harder to conceal the ruthlessness of the struggle for power, or ignore the consequences of losing it. There were people at Saturday night's dinner who really could end up in jail -- depending on Patrick Fitzgerald's theory of the case and/or the results of the next two elections. Things have been done over the past five years that can't be undone; crimes committed that can't be uncommitted. If Colbert faced a tough crowd last night, it was probably because so many of them understand that the Cheneyites and the Rovians really are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenberg, and that if the airship goes down in flames their own window seats are going to get pretty toasty. Jobs are at stake. Careers could be at stake. For all we know lives could be at stake. It's an ugly moment, and expecting people like that to laugh at their own misfortunes isn't very realistic. I'll give Colbert major props for his political courage, but not� for knowing how to please his audience. If he'd really been working the room Saturday night, he would have thrown in a few step-n-fetch it Arabs, a snotty Brit and some white trash clowns -- like the stock characters in American Dreamz. It wouldn't have been nearly as funny, but it might have helped the kool kids forget their sorrows, at least briefly. |
oh God
"Cheney administration", "it's media lapdogs", "Cheney regime" "Cheneyites" absolute drivel.
^^ Bush is nothing but a useful idiot. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the men behind the curtain, amongst others.
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| Originally posted by shaolin_Z ^^ Bush is nothing but a useful idiot. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the men behind the curtain, amongst others. |
Stephen Colbert to Replace Michael Chertoff?
By E&P Staff
Published: April 28, 2006 11:50 PM ET updated Friday
NEW YORK With Fox News commentator Tony Snow hired as White House press secretary, Comedy Central anchor man Stephen Colbert suggested late Thursday that President Bush add other conservative talk show hosts to his cabinet.
The host of The Colbert Report proposed posts for Rush LImbaugh and Sean Hannity, and pushed his hero, Bill O'Reilly, for new Pentagon chief. Bush could send off Donald Rumsfeld with "the Medal of Freedom," he pointed out. The only problem with this is that O'Reilly would probably push for "an invasion of Vermont," he mused.
Colbert then suggested that Bush tab him to replace Michael Chertoff as head of Homeland Security. Chertoff, he complained, "has not done a thing" to control the bear population. A running "joke" on the show is Colbert's hatred of bears.
Earlier, Colbert had wondered, deadpan, if Snow would be able to handle the "radical" switch from Fox News to "apologist" for the president.
Colbert will be emcee at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C. on Saturday night. Among the guests will be Valerie Plame, Alex Trebeck and E&P's own Joe Strupp.
E&P Staff
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/e...t_id=1002424618
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| Originally posted by shaolin_Z ^^ Bush is nothing but a useful idiot. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the men behind the curtain, amongst others. |
f***in moron. let your imagination soar...and stfu
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| Originally posted by Q5echo right. because only you know how it works behind the curtain f***in moron. let your imagination soar...and stfu |
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| Originally posted by metalgearsolid I just knew a comment like that would hurt you republicans. |
The bitchslapping that Colbert did to Bush and the Press was quite a sight to behold, and oh so shockingly wasn't picked up much at all by that "darn librul media". Good article on it is here:
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| The truthiness hurts Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping. By Michael Scherer May. 01, 2006 | Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a dangerous man -- a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist with boring hair and rimless glasses. It's a wonder the Secret Service let him so close to the president of the United States. But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year's most fawning celebration of the self-importance of the D.C. press corps, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies ominously announced, "Tonight, no one is safe." Colbert is not just another comedian with barbed punch lines and a racy vocabulary. He is a guerrilla fighter, a master of the old-world art of irony. For Colbert, the punch line is just the addendum. The joke is in the setup. The meat of his act is not in his barbs but his character -- the dry idiot, "Stephen Colbert," God-fearing pitchman, patriotic American, red-blooded pundit and champion of "truthiness." "I'm a simple man with a simple mind," the deadpan Colbert announced at the dinner. "I hold a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there." Then he turned to the president of the United States, who sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. "I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world." |
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| It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke. It's a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called the "critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems." Colbert's jokes attacked not just Bush's policies, but the whole drama and language of American politics, the phony demonstration of strength, unity and vision. "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady," Colbert continued, in a nod to George W. Bush. "You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday." |
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| It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth. Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine. In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery "d�tournement," a word that roughly translates to "abduction" or "embezzlement." It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. "Plagiarism is necessary," wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. "Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas." But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as evidenced by our "freedom fries," have not found a welcome reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for Colbert. The depth of his attack caused bewilderment on the face of the president and some of the press, who, like myopic fish, are used to ignoring the water that sustains them. Laura Bush did not shake his hand. Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist. "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function," wrote David Foster Wallace, in his seminal 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram." "It's critical and destructive, a ground clearing." So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well. |
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| FLASH: Colbert averaging just over one million viewers a night (1,077,000], year to date on COMEDY CENTRAL, which is less than FOXNEWS's 6-11pm line-up... www.drudgereport.com |
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| Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was �surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story � the president�s side and the vice president�s side." He also reflected on the alleged good old days, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story. Addressing the reporters, he said, "You should spend more time with your families, write that novel you�ve always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know� fiction." http://www.editorandpublisher.com/e...t_id=1002425363 |
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| A day after he exploded his bomb at the correspondents dinner, Colbert appeared on CBS's "60 Minutes," this time as himself, an actor, a suburban dad, a man without a red and blue tie. The real Colbert admitted that he does not let his children watch his Comedy Central show. "Kids can't understand irony or sarcasm, and I don't want them to perceive me as insincere," Colbert explained. "Because one night, I'll be putting them to bed and I'll say ... 'I love you, honey.' And they'll say, 'I get it. Very dry, Dad. That's good stuff.'" His point was spot-on. Irony is dangerous and must be handled with care. But America can rest assured that for the moment its powers are in good hands. Stephen Colbert, the current grandmaster of the art, knows exactly what he was doing. Just don't expect him to be invited back to the correspondents dinner. -- By Michael Scherer http://www.salon.com/opinion/featur.../05/01/colbert/ |
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| Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert's biting routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner won a rare silent protest from Bush aides and supporters Saturday when several independently left before he finished. "Colbert crossed the line," said one top Bush aide, who rushed out of the hotel as soon as Colbert finished. Another said that the president was visibly angered by the sharp lines that kept coming. "I've been there before, and I can see that he is [angry]," said a former top aide. "He's got that look that he's ready to blow." http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/a...01/1whwatch.htm |
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| That's nice. I mean, we wouldn't want Bush to blow a gasket over the fact that he lied to the American people, totally blew the war in Iraq, keeps his top aide on staff even though he's a traitor and a known security risk, lost an entire American city while he was on vacation, blew the Clinton budget surplus, has destroyed America's image in the world, was asleep at the switch on September 11, has yet to catch Osama, was ready to sell our ports to the United Arab Emirates, gutted mining safety right before those miners died, and oh so much more. No, what apparently wakes Bush up from his stupor is a comedian making fun of him. |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo oh great it's the f**kin peanut gallery. is that all your good at? mr. "i-got-a-handful of useless hate to give" does that comment come with any substance but a fair amount of ignorance and whimzical imagination? |
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| Originally posted by Q5echo oh great it's the f**kin peanut gallery. is that all your good at? mr. \"i-got-a-handful of useless hate to give\" does that comment come with any substance but a fair amount of ignorance and whimzical imagination? |
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| Originally posted by OurManFlint So, you let physical facts do your deciding for you? What ever happened to rationality? We will probably never know whether observations like this are wrong, but we will also never really know if they are right, thus you have to use rationality to decide for yourself, and most people are not as delusional as yourself. Wait, Bush was voted in a second term, nevermind. |
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN haha, whilst i agree with your sentiments, i find your partisan opinions almost as bad. i follow your posts with keen interests, |
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| but i simply cannot recall ONE occasion where you have conceded an anti republican argument. ever. nobody's right all the time |
i don't think so.
The skit was a venture into comedy and humor ... that's it. It's not a comprehensive thesis dissertation that warrants commentary beyond "it was funny" or "it wasn't funny" and the elements that make it so. Personally I thought it was hiliarious. Especially at how in character Colbert was despite the vip audience and the lukewarm/uncomfortable reactions he received from crowd at some of his jokes. All in all I think it was an overwhelming success ... I mean for ffs how many other white hoouse correspondence dinners generated this much attention and interest?
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| Originally posted by Q5echo you want to talk about rationality? so you also think Cheney is the puppetmaster? you either do or you don't. don't piss all over the arguement from a fence and say "but we'll never really know". wtf is that? |
About Colbert not being funny: I must disagree. I just watched it again and found myself laughing out loud at bits that flew over my head in the first place. Did anyone catch on to the criticism of Bush's many days off, hidden in the part about the energy crisis? Ok, maybe I'm just slow.
About Colbert being a hero: I think this is pushing it. I don't think Colbert came there with a plan to draw shocked gasps rather than laughter. He clearly despised his audience ("I feel nothing but contempt for these people. I know how to handle these clowns"), and I do think that that clouded his judgment on how tough he should get.
About the media not covering it up: Give me a break. You could find *nothing* searching google news for "bush colbert" until the blogs went crazy about that fact. And the story did seem newsworthy - at least as newsworthy as Cheney shooting someone in the face, as a chinese woman shouting at the Chinese president, as Springsteen criticising the Katrina effort, etc. - after all this was president of the US being shamed on live TV.
Btw. what do you guys think about this one:
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| House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) took on a rare role yesterday as a defender of President Bush. Hoyer came to the defense of the commander in chief after Saturday�s White House Correspondents� Association dinner, where the president took a drubbing from comedian Stephen Colbert. �I thought some of it was funny, but I think it got a little rough,� Hoyer said. �He is the president of the United States, and he deserves some respect.� �I�m certainly not a defender of the administration,� Hoyer reassured stunned observers, but Colbert �crossed the line� with many jokes that were �in bad taste.� Colbert needled Bush, often prompting only an expressionless stare from the president, who appeared not to be amused. |
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| Originally posted by occrider The skit was a venture into comedy and humor ... that's it. It's not a comprehensive thesis dissertation that warrants commentary beyond "it was funny" or "it wasn't funny" and the elements that make it so. Personally I thought it was hiliarious. Especially at how in character Colbert was despite the vip audience and the lukewarm/uncomfortable reactions he received from crowd at some of his jokes. All in all I think it was an overwhelming success ... I mean for ffs how many other white hoouse correspondence dinners generated this much attention and interest? |
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