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.

We have enough for which to hate Bush without exaggerating. Sarcasm by its nature relies on hyperbole, that is to say, on its own lack of truth. A speech that relies on its lack of truth for effect cannot possibly convince anyone. Instead, it just looks mean-spirited.

As evil as Bush is, looking mean only plays into his hands. It shows that our hatred has made us completely irrational. An attack like Colbert's actually makes Bush sympathetic rather than despicable.

And, yes, Colbert did look cowardly by attacking Bush at a formal dinner that way. If anyone talked like that to me, I would leave, demand time to defend myself verbally or, maybe, if that person were smaller than I am, even ask him to repeat the same words outside. Bush did not have any of those options, and Colbert knew it.

"And, yes, Colbert did look cowardly by attacking Bush at a formal dinner that way."

So now someone's a coward if they confront someone (even humorously) with the truth in a public setting? Funny, I thought the coward's way was to attack someone with lies behind their back. If it's cowardice to speak the truth to liars, we need more cowards like Stephen Colbert.

"If anyone talked like that to me, I would leave..."

As opposed to acknowledging the truth about yourself?

"...demand time to defend myself verbally..."

As opposed to developing a sense of humor about yourself (you must be a hoot at parties)?

"... or, maybe, if that person were smaller than I am, even ask him to repeat the same words outside."

And there you have it: you advocate beating up other people you don't like, but only if they're smaller than you. And you have the nerve to call a better man than yourself a coward?

"Bush did not have any of those options, and Colbert knew it."

Over two elections, this country didn't have the option of not having Dumbya as faux-President, regardless of not electing him to the office twice. Sorry, but that doesn't compare to being made fun of by a professional satirist in public.

If Dumbya wanted to avoid being called a liar and worse, he shouldn't have agreed to be a part of overthrowing democracy and stealing the Presidency. If he hadn't, hundreds of thousands of human beings wouldn't be dead or injured, poor Dumbya's unearned sense of entitlement would be secure, and the entire world would have been better off.

Colbert is the definition of a hero in this Golden Age of cowards.

SNAP!!!!!

You've been shown the TRUE COWARD that YOU are James. If you had a brain, you would face this FACT (proven by your own words) and make it a moment of self reflection and actually learn something.

I'm not counting on it.

"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.

I feel that Colbert was brilliant. We all know that he loves making his interviewees uncomfortable - he prods and pokes them with absurd questions and performances. In fact, he pioneered that whole style of questioning. Before Colbert, people like Beth Littleford used to just edit their interviews to make the subject look stupid.

Colbert was using his unique skills on Saturday to make everyone in the room uncomfortable. However, I don't think that he was necessarily offering a serious critique of anything. I don't think he ever has. The entire point of the 'better know a district' bits on his show are to make the congressperson squirm in their seat. It is not to critique the current performance of the Lower House or any of its individual members.

In Colbert's 60 minutes interview, we get the impression that he is a soft-spoken, private family man. A man who - after the death of father and brothers - stopped taking life seriously and just tried to cheer his mother up (and, by extension, himself).

His performance on Saturday was for himself. It was 'Hey, look at how I can destroy the comfortable atmosphere that is in this room.' There were 2,500 people in that room, and a lot of them, including the Daily Show's Ed Helms, were probably not offended by the content of the material. Some of those people probably have written about the NSA wiretaps or the abuses at Gitmo or even the crappy way the Katrina fiasco was handled by the federal government. I have a feeling that Colbert went home (with his attractive wife - Did you see her when they walked into the press dinner together? Good for him.) that night, queued up the DVR, stared at the audience reaction shots, and laughed himself to sleep.

(do people do that? laugh themselves to sleep? I didn't know how to end this thing)