The poster below is right. Sports don't require courage, or save lives. Medicical personnell, police and fire personnel, soldiers, people who save lives, donate kidneys, etc are heroes.

This society worships celebrity. We didn't do that until the 30s. It's time to dial it back.

"Unfortunately, Mr. Kemp's Cambridge-educated English teacher did not teach him the limits of satire and sarcasm. To those who do not agree with the speaker, sarcasm looks like rhetorical desperation, like burning one's own house to keep warm. In short, it never works.

History does not bear that out. Rhethorical desperation does not draw the response that satire does. Remember the court fight over "The Wind Done Gone"? Or Dave Chappelle's hilarious satire on white supremacists, with his black Klansmen? Satire is particularly effective because it uses the other sides' points to wound them.

But the previous writer seems to imply satire should be abandoned because of the victim's perspective. Why? Isn't it the audience's perception that is important? I'm not throwing out Steven Allen and a number of satirists because the rich and powerful did not get the joke. Clearly, many did, on the left and the right. Then again, there are plenty of Republicans who can laugh at themselves, just as there are plenty of Democrats who can laugh at themselves. This particular crowd included a particular subset of whiners.

The people who look desperate and whiny are the rightist ideologues. What happened to their sense of humor? I thought only leftists were supposed to be humorless and oversensitive? When the right starts sounding like a parody of the extreme 60s left, I now that things in the conservative movement are in need of reform, quickly.

I read the transcript. Colbert didn't exaggerate. Bush himself had been joking about the 32% approval rating. Last year, he joked about the missing WMD. What Bolbert did was parrot the ideologues so perfectly that they became couldn't understand why this was supposed to be humor. WHy would their "truth" be humor? The fact that other people did find it funny (Scalia, several general, etc evidently were laughing) just added to the problem.

But the attack on the press core was not satire. That was direct insult. It was also deserved. The failures of the Washington press corp, it's addiction to leaking and anonymous sources, it's priviledging of speed over accuracy, it's laziness in research, it's arrogance, it's missteps (Washington Post and that blog, for a recent example), plagarism, and sometimes simply refusal to follow long held standards of jouralistic excellence, are well chronicled in many places. Colbert was nice about their spinelessness.

I'm an independant. I suggest some Republican ideologues get a sense of humor, before independants institutionalize the phrase "whiny conservatives". It's getting close. We are tired of this type of whining silliness.

There would be no story if the officials had laughed. That is the price of too much self-importance.

She's a priviledged elitist with a schtick. The schtick is bashing feminists. If the press doesn't give her publicity, she won't make money.

It's ironic that the mainstream press is effectively trying to do that to Colbert right now. This woman's victimhood (clearly she hasn't been around any union white guys lately, or single mothers, or people of color who are American born)is to sell books to the right. Calling herself a Democrat is a marketing technique. As in "see they know how bankrupt they are?" She's basically a neoconservative without the smarts or education, because she screws up her facts in her interviews a lot. Her poverty and crime discussions are so factually inaccurate as to be hilarious.

Why is it so important to keep her a Democrat? She won't write her checks to Doctors Without Borders if she's a Republican?

She's not going to leave. She's getting cash off the affiliation. What I don't get is how she thinks she's a victim.

They are Somalian and Ethiopian legal immigrants who risked life and limb legally to get here. I see poor whites and poor blacks who also want to pay rent, to live. There's no welfare in most of the states anymore. I see rural poverty that is awful, here in the US. Try people living in shacks. Why must these groups pay because Fox and the Mexican government don't want to provide living wage jobs? Haitians kills themselves to get here, but somehow amnesty advocates forget them, or the pain of the Haitian guest workers in the sugar fields in Florida.

They all want a better life. But the law says American citizens and legal immigrants first. I can not condone creating a better life for illegals while condemning legal residents to a sub-middle class life.

Closing the border is an indictment of NAFTA and the failure of globalization. Globalization has lifted only the rich by robbing the poor. It doesn't have to be that way. The strongest of the rising economic powers, China, does not play by globalization's rules. it protects it's markets, violates copyright and intellectual property laws, subsidizes and preferences business, and regulates capitalism with a heavy hand. According to economists advocating globalization, it should be withering. But it's economies like Mexico that are withering.

Close the border and force these states to face the fury of the people they sold out to the IMF. Fine or destroy the businesses that illegally advertise for and hire illegals. Fine and jail the individual greedy folks who hire illegals under the table.

Until we do those things, the people who come here illegally will continue to be exploited, and the businesses will use them to circumvent market forces. Until we do that, the middle class will continue to erode. This is not about human rights, it is about whether the nation is run for the good of citizens or the good of business. Business can not trump citizens.