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

quote:

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

For a transcript:
Daily KOS

Its obvious Bush was expecting to help his approval ratings by poking fun at himself, something that hes done and has worked before. This time it was just a more extravagant display and no doubt, following the mentality of Bush, designed to push back at those pushing him through the use of humor. If you watch the video you can tell he is pleased with himself when he walks back to his seat.

What he was not expecting was Colbert, who also through the use of humor, brought up a whole swath of good points and critiques on a range of issues. Its important that when analyzing something like this, to see past the humor that is only being used as a vehicle to state some opinion.

Its also important that this event is not down played. What commentator wouldn't give their left nut to be able to give a speech right next to Bush and in front of the media elite? Colbert is THE MAN! If you didn't know his name then, you know it now, and if you weren't watching his show, you're watching it now.

I'm still amazed at how well he presented himself, especially when Bush was staring at him the whole time like "Uhhh, you do know I can have you killed, right?"

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

quote:

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.

Last edited by Q5echo on May-02-2006 at 06:48

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.

quote:

Originally posted by trancaholic Third thread in the PDD covering this topic.

what?

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo what?

1, 2, 3

those don't count. they suck

quote:

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

Nah I don't think Colbert was trying to be funny at all. The content of his speech was set up as humor but the message was loud and clear. He was there to make a statement, and who wouldn't in his situation when you have the ears of all those people.

That room was filled with names that pop up in this forum on a daily basis! You can tell some of those things he said he was being really serious as in "YES I'M BEING SARCASTIC."

Last edited by josh4 on May-02-2006 at 09:25

Why they weren't laughing/hope he is right:

quote:

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.

(Source)

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.

___________________
"The Greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." -Stephen Hawking
"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak out for me." -Martin Niemöller

quote:

Originally posted by shaolin_Z ^^ Bush is nothing but a useful idiot. Cheney and Rumsfeld are the men behind the curtain, amongst others.

dont forget Jesus