Colbert. Brave Like a Kid At the Zoo
Apparently Peter Daou really, really, really loved Stephen Colbert Saturday night.
The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was televised on C-Span Saturday evening. Featured entertainer Stephen Colbert delivered a biting rebuke of George W. Bush and the lily-livered press corps. He did it to Bush’s face, unflinching and unbowed by the audience’s muted, humorless response.
I didn’t see Colbert “live”, as it were. I, unlike Daou, actually have a life that extends a good bit beyond waiting for someone to spend 20 minutes or so calling George Bush a buffoon to his face.
I did catch a lot of the entire “comedy” part of the evening later on the web, though, mostly because I enjoy watching the President do what, to my knowledge, no other world leader does regularly – use comedy to skewer himself in front of the entire world. I’ve enjoyed watching Presidents do this going back as far as C-SPAN has televised the event and every year I’ve come out the other side not only entertained but also with a better opinion of the man.
I’ve not always enjoyed the “roasts” that have followed. Sometimes they’re just plain bad. The comedian they hire to do this, for whatever reason, just flat-out bombs. Funny or not, though, the comedian never breaks from the “roast” idea of his part of the evening.
Doing a roast is not an easy thing. You have to be funny and, yeah, really biting, but you also have to make sure your audience has the impression, from the very beginning, that you don’t have any personal animosity toward the target of the roast. Actually, you have to do better than that; you have to make sure the audience understands that you like the target personally. Celebrity roasts usually work becaue they’re not personal. The jabs and daggers are sharp, but they’re not thrown to injure. They contain nuggets of truth, but they’re not loaded with malice.
Colbert bombed, and got the big, wet, sloppy tongue-kiss from Daou because his barbs were meant to injure as badly as possible. He didn’t get any laughs Saturday night because what he said wasn’t funny. Daou isn’t laughing at humor. He’s laughing because President Bush, being the pretty classy guy that he is and because he understands propriety, had to sit there and take everything that Colbert gave him. He’s laughing because he would really loved to have been Colbert but, like so many leftists, lacks the essential courage necessary to act on his feelings.
Oh sure, he writes about his hatred, but he does it on friendly ground, to syncophants (don’t believe me? Check the comment section of his post), far from anyone capable of meaningfully disagreement.
Like Colbert who, as one of his commenters said, bravely “went into the lion’s den” – a lion’s den full of suspected lions who, contrary to the panicked whinnying from the leftists, have yet to jail a single person for saying that George Bush is a giant poopyhead. For all Colbert’s supposed bravery, he walked away with a healthy paycheck and will go on the air for his next show unbothered by the jackbooted minions of the dour Prince of All Evil Dick Cheney and his Chimpypuppet BushHitler (or is that his Evil Overlord? It’s difficult to keep all the name straight among the leftists. Maybe they should put out a scorecard or a flowchart or something). He reminds me of the kid who thinks he’s brave because he stuck out his tongue at the lions in the zoo.
Daou calls Colbert “unflinching and unbowed”. I call him an ass who needs to remember anything his parents may have taught him about manners when he was little.
(h/t: Stephen Spruiell)
Meanwhile, Ace hits Colbert, and the MSM, from another angle altogether:
The media feigns offense at being attacked by Colbert, while actually they’re delighted, the same as they’re delighted to be Mau-Maued by liberal interest groups. It gives them the license they want to move even further left than they already are, and rebut charges of liberal bias by noting that sages Colbert and Stewart and Alterman and the rest say they’re too right-wing, so, gosh, they must be pretty fair, right?
Right.
I’m sick of the arrogance of these people. I could give a shit about Colbert’s opinion about Bush– it’s his opinion and he’s welcome to it.
But when it comes to an incontrovertible FACT — like the FACT that the media is overwhelmingly liberal, sympathetic to Democrats, and slants their stories in that fashion, both unconsciously but more frequently consciously — I’m afraid I can’t just dismiss this bullshit as an agree-to-disagree situation.
It’s a goddamned lie. The media is lying, the Mau-Mau left is lying, Colbert is lying, they’re all goddamned lying about things they know to not be true, and I’m sick to death of it.
Read his whole post. His point gets bolstered by Daou’s post, which has the Brave Sir Colbert speaking “truthiness to power” against an Imperial President and His Lapdog Media. The very idea that Daou could even begin to consider an MSM that would recklessly risk the lives of Americans to print stories that might damage President Bush to be his adoring fans is ludicrous on its face and makes Daou about as reliable as a suit of balsa wood armor.
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Category: Moonbat Nonsense
Colbert was brilliant! The humor was in watching his targets squirm under the merciless glare of genius. Who DOESN'T like to see the bad guy whimper while Clint Eastwood delivers the morality lecture just before pulling the trigger?
By taking on the most powerful man in the world while looking him in the eye at arm's length, Colbert displayed more courage than the entire mainstream press over the last six years. He is Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Will Rogers rolled up into one guy with brass cojones the size of Manhattan.
A casual survey of the blogsphere shows that the positive reviews are running about 100-1 ahead of the whiners who can't handle the truthiness, and that the video is setting download records in spite of a virtual media blackout.
America loves Colbert, and anyone who passes along the GOP talking point that he "bombed" is seriously out of touch with mainstream America.
Over here two downloadable clips of Steven Colbert Whitehouse correspondents:
http://files.ww.com/download.html?id=13903 (16 min / 26 Mb Quicktime)
http://files.ww.com/download.html?id=13904 (15 min / 10 Mb WindowsMedia)
Yeah, Repack…it sure took loads of courage to do that in a setting where he would face absolutely no damage to himself or his career either then or at any time in the future. Like I said, he was like a kid making faces as the lions at the zoo, secure in the knowledge that the lions couldn't possibly get to him. It was a safe bet for him.
Loved the Colbert bit. Watching people squirm in their seats was the best though. They weren't sure if they should be laughing or not. After Bush stopped smiling, the rest of the right followed. He was not happy. It's not every day someone ten feet away tells you you're an idiot.
I dunno, PC. Sounds like an average day at the DMV for most of us.
I don't get how the fact that somebody can be an absolute boor and stink up the joint qualifies them as a comic genius. By that measure, Manhattan has many, many comic geniuses so profound that they have entire subway cars to themselves at rush hour.
I don't have the necessary information to determine whether or not Steven Colbert was "lying," as some put it. However, to dismiss outright the courage of his actions is somewhat petty. If you disagree with Colbert, fine, that's your right and you may be right. But, regardless of whether or not he is right, Colbert put forth an argument, through satire, that was bitingly critical. Should he, having been asked to speak at this event, lie (from his perspective) for the sake of niceties. It is obvious from his speech that he believes what the president has done and is doing is wrong, and, given the chance, he told him so. Isn't that a sort of courage? What should we expect? From the point of view of somebody who believes that Bush led us to an unwarranted war, aren't they obliged to say so? Disagree with him, but don't dismiss him.
Wait, Mike. He used Satire?
Maybe you and I understand the word differently but he basically just said "George Bush, you're a liar. Media people? You're fawning lapdogs", and that was really all he did. He didn't do it especially cleverly. He didn't even do it from behind the veneer of civil dissent.
I do dismiss his courage, because it's painfully easy these days to say, even to the President's face, that he's an idiot. For all the leftist panic about fascism and theocracies and dissent being stifled, we've not throw one dissident in prison, not jailed one newspaper editor for publishing something disagreeable (even though we probably should for committing a willful act of espionage), not exiled one single citizen for doing what Colbert did. In fact, calling Bush a Nazi rakes in the big bucks, as groups like moveon.org and Senators like Dick Durbin have found out recently.
So where, exactly, is the courage here?
You ask me not to dismiss him, but I, as a rational and resonable person, can do nothing but. He was boorish and insulting in a venue where it was far from warranted. He has a regular television show from which he may pontificate at his leisure free from any threat of imprisonment. Let him make his speeches there.
Let's not pretend that the guy is Lenny Bruce. It's not like he pounded his schlong on the table and shook it at Laura, full well knowing he was going to either go to jail or take a beating.
To me it just looked like an infantile tirade against the president; a man displaying his ability to get in some licks without regard to civility or decorum. But who hasn't had a few too many, or gotten a little too full of himself and said or done mean and hurtful things? Who hasn't played the bully at least once? I once put a small, frail, white haired bespectacled senior supply sergeant who was not especially well liked and was known for being mean-spirited and petty into a head lock at his retirement party while his wife and children looked on, much to his humiliation and to the horror and shame of everybody there. Did that qualify as comic genius? Sure didn't feel like it.
Maybe that's it – maybe some people who don't have the fortitude to step out of character and live out their fantasy of inflicting some pain vicariously got a thrill from seeing Colbert's "frail egghead" persona bully a man known for his "cowboy" persona, and for the guy to have to sit there and take it. Wow, man bullies another man publicly and in front of his wife and everybody he cares about, to the horror and shock of everybody there. Pure comic genius.
Jimmie:
1)
Satire: "Irony, sarcasm, or caustic wit used to attack or expose folly, vice, or stupidity."
I'm not claiming that Colbert's attacks are founded, but they were attacks, and they were made using a technique commonly referred to as satire. For instance, consider the following:
"Wow, wow, what an honor. The White House correspondents' dinner. To just sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man…my name is Stephen Colbert and it's my privilege tonight to celebrate our president. He's not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut…Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut…I'm a simple man with a simple mind, with 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. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states."
There is a perception, which may or may not be accurate, that President Bush prefers to trust his instincts over possibly contradictory facts. Through the use of irony and particularly sarcasm, Colbert criticizes this practice. Whether or not he should have done so, or did so effectively or fairly, this was an instance of satire. Your assessment that he "basically just said 'George Bush, you’re a liar. Media people? You’re fawning lapdogs'" is unfair. He did not basically say that. He may have been trying to make that point, but he did so through SATIRE. Possibly bad satire, but satire nonetheless.
2)
"For all the leftist panic about fascism and theocracies and dissent being stifled, we’ve not throw one dissident in prison, not jailed one newspaper editor for publishing something disagreeable (even though we probably should for committing a willful act of espionage), not exiled one single citizen for doing what Colbert did. In fact, calling Bush a Nazi rakes in the big bucks, as groups like moveon.org and Senators like Dick Durbin have found out recently."
I'm not exactly sure what your point was here. Where in his speech did Colbert assert the President Bush is a Nazi? I make no claim that his courage is on the same level as those who risk life and limb to stand up to people they disagree with, but it is still a form of courage. A lesser form of it, but still courage. The fact that calling Bush a Nazi is absurd is irrelevant. Colbert disagrees with President Bush. He believes we are at war because of an intentional lie. He believes it is wrong to illegally wiretap American citizens. He does not seem to believe that George Bush is a Nazi. So why does it matter that other people, who may agree with some of Colbert's assertions, do?
3)
"He was boorish and insulting in a venue where it was far from warranted. He has a regular television show from which he may pontificate at his leisure free from any threat of imprisonment. Let him make his speeches there."
What exactly was Colbert supposed to do here? He wasn't a gate-crasher, he didn't force his way on to the stage, he was invited to speak. Is he supposed to play nice because that's what other people want? I'm having trouble articulating my point, so I'll use an analogy. To an evangelical christian, it is his or her responsibility to convert non-christians to christianity. Otherwise, they will go to hell. Should they refrain from this duty for the sake of decorum? Because it makes other people uncomfortable? If you believe that abortion is murder, it's morally reprehensible not to oppose it, in the same way that it's morally reprehensible not to oppose the murder of an adult. So why should Colbert, when given the chance, refrain from criticizing a man whom he believes to be acting immorally? Because it's impolite? If you believe that we are fighting a war that we should not be because the President tricked us, shouldn't you stand up for your belief? You might be wrong, but it's the duty of the people who know that to correct your beliefs.
To summarize: Steven Colbert is a gadfly. Possibly an idiotic gadfly, but that is no fault of his. Gadflies are good. They are neccessary. That doesn't make them correct, but it doesn't mean they should stop.
He was boorish and insulting in a venue where it was far from warranted.
I gues you're a bigger fan of the kind of humor George W. Bush used a couple of years ago, pretending to look everywhere for the "missing" WMD that he had killed thousands of people over.
Don Imus was far more savage to Bill Clinton, and the media loved it. When did you change your mind about insulting the president?
You're right, jokes about a guy who makes a mistake that kills thousands of people are funny. Laura Bush's jokes about Mr. Bush masturbating a horse, comedy gold.
The truth about incompetence, don't wanna HEAR it. Can't we talk about masturbating horses or killing people by mistake?
He has a regular television show from which he may pontificate at his leisure free from any threat of imprisonment. Let him make his speeches there.
Let him make his speehes anywhere people will pay him to do so. They hired him for the show, and they got exactly what he does on TV. What did they expect?
I found a higher quality download of Stephen Colbert White house correspondents:
http://files.ww.com/download.html?id=13906
(16 min / 65 Mb Quicktime: top quality!)
Now you can see the expressions on the faces very well
This last video is great! Thanks Joe!