I think James makes a great point. Bush should have been allowed to make a rebuttal. Where else will he ever find a forum to get his viewpoint across?

Stephen Colbert! My Hero!

For years, the FAR right has had a monopoly of biting opinion. The sane moderates have been so damn polite that they have let a bunch of chicken hawk christo fascists run roughshod over everything for which America supposedly stood. Not only is the moderate getting back on his feet, but he is way funnier than than the humourless right wingnuts that have polluted the airways and discourse for so many years. For those who think Colbert was out of line; screw off, you've had your time and you've fucked the world up bigtime.

I loved everything about Colbert's performance. He was so spot on about Bush, politicians in general and the White House Press Corps except for a few rabble rousers we all know and love. It took some courage to do it in front of the people he was trying to use irony to get to. I think the audience response was just so perfect. "You're messing with me so I'm sitting on my hands and shutting down my vocal chords".

Since when did all these famous Hollywood types get to decorate the place? I think that is disgusting! Fame and Power wins the day again. How about what actually was visible, shame and inability to do any critical thinking while running the country into the ground! Is there an anthem for that?

Tucker Carlson pointed out how he is normally a fan of Colbert's humor, but he found the performance lacking. I wonder if he wanted to poke Colbert with a stick and say "we brought you here to be funny, be funny". Colbert was obviously not the performing monkey he wanted to see.

I'm still trying to decide what was funnier, Colbert's performance or the press and prez audience not laughing. It was like someone let a big loud stinky fart in church - the sound and smell are obnoxious... but the silence of people trying to ignore it is hilarious!

I never imagined I'd live in an America where comedy was perceived on party lines.

That being said, the harsh response to Colbert's burlesque performance on Saturday comes as no surprise: no one thinks its funny when their uglier personas are parroted in front of them in the exact same way they mock their ideological opponents. Think O'Reilly and Limbaugh, and the nasty way they ridicule those on the left.

But Colbert elevated these dirty tactics to high art this last weekend in ways that Al Franken and even Jon Stewart had failed to (or not had the will to) do in the past.

Of course the joke isn't funny when you're the brunt of it. That right leaning blogs are working themselves into a lather to point out how unfunny enough is evidence enough of the piece's sublime effectiveness.

Isn't it IRONIC that Ezra Pound went to Fascist Italy to support Mussolini and wrote propaganda for him. Pick a better example if you want to make a point. Maybe citing Orwell and his condemnation of political euphemism or Hannah Arendt's trashing of "truth" in politics in favor of "facts" would elevate your message into the level of academic discourse--destroying the very directness of Colbert's brilliant performance--instead of pulling out the senile right-wing Pound. In truth, there are few satirists who have ever had the opportunity to so directly assault their targets. Voltaite, Swift, Twain, etc. never had the opportunity to reduce their targets in their presence. What we witnessed was historic and unfortunately will probably not be repeated.

Now that's America! Dude, we found our country! Best, best, BEST thing this century! That's the most astoundingly brave thing I've seen since the guys with box cutters flew planes into buildings. Finally, a proper response. Oh, bless you, bless you, bless you, Stephen Colbert. One guy. Wow, he did it. He did it. I can't believe he did it. One guy. One guy. Superman is Clark Kent.

Colbert's criticism of the White House press corps was spot on. With the brave and increasingly marginalized exceptions of people like Helen Thomas, they have turned into a mob of timid, fawning stenographers.

Am I the only one who watched in disgust Rumsfield's press conferences a few years ago? He joked about the "Shock & Awe" that was butchering thousands of conscripts (as if a similar number of innocents were not being simultaneously blasted out of existence in homes, schools and hospitals) and the press corps responded like android laugh machines?

Yes, Mytoonk, in the later part of his life Pound was a fascist. He was a tremendously gifted man who went mad. As you probably know,he spent several years after the war in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, having avoided charges of treason by reason of insanity. At the end of his life he renounced antisemitism as a "Midwestern prejudice."

Whether Pound's mad treasonous activities in Italy negate the worth of all his earlier accomplishments will never be a settled question. For myself, I can only say with Horatio, "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown."

Like Pound, I know a lot more about literature than I do about politics, and it is for this reason that I cited Pound rather than the other authors you mention. Perhaps I should have left him out of it, and simply cited the Analects of Confucius, since that is where my thought comes from.

Best,

Dan

-- Ianscot:

Finally watching Colbert's routine last night, I was a little taken aback at how obvious it all seemed.

Agreed! Effing tragic, ain't it? I didn't see the live event, but read the transcript and, while I loved it and appreciate very much the (hairy!) cojones it took even to whip that bit out, I do agree that there were some missed opportunities. ITMFA.

The whole idea of this event is for the politician to deflate criticism by mocking him (or her) self. That's what the W. impersonator was about. That's what George W's "Where can the WMD be" "joke" was about, remember?

Right on! I wanted to be in that audience, raise my hand and ask quietly, "why is this a joke? Are the families of the dead soldiers chuckling along with you? 'Oh, snap! Those silly WMDs seem to have gotten away from us again - that W, what a card!'" What a towering bastard. ITMFA.

In my most cynical moments, I imagine that the whole last 5+ years is just a big show-biz scam. There is no presidency - nothing even close - and we're being manipulated to obsess over the little-picture details of the too-close, statistically bogus, possibly fraudulent elections, the who-knew-what-when, etc., etc., etc. - because that way, it continues to escape us that the object of our wrath is something totally different from what we think it is, there's no multi-partite, tri-cameral, checked-and-balanced representative anything,... and then I manage to spin down a little bit, take off the tinfoil hat, and calm down with a triple-espresso and actually laugh at the thought of W seething in his tighty-whities during Colbert's bit.

Still, to be on the safe side, ITMFA.