Finally watching Colbert's routine last night, I was a little taken aback at how obvious it all seemed. Sure, the "audition" for Press Secretary was well-timed, but if you want to see the original article in that sense go rewatch the Clinton tape about his final days in the White House. Colbert's monologue barbs, too, were nothing new at all.

The difference was delivering things in the presence of the big W. himself -- and heck, that's what the Correspondents' Dinner is about. Nancy Reagan, back in the day, sang her song about borrowed dresses and won over a Press Corps that had laid into her for accepting free designer fashion. 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?

What we really saw here was just how insular Bush's administration has become. The man can't even be exposed to playful criticism without looking like an utter and abject failure. That isn't Stephen Colbert's accomplishment, gutty as the guy might have been for a moment. That trophy belongs on W. Bush's mantle.

Colbert was willing to be more crass than someone else might have been, okay. He did say "shoot in the face" instead of something blander about "going hunting with Dick Cheney." But anyone given the assignment of "roasting" the administration could have managed the same effect.

Heck, Colbert didn't use half of the potential material. Where was the stuff about Presidential Daily Briefing? (Hint to writers: at the end of your monologue, you tell the President he should have seen it all coming because of that PDB last month.) Where was the stuff about Harriet Miers being the best qualified person for Press Secretary anyway? There were no jokes about the Supreme Court at all. How about something to do with "signing statements" that vitiate the sense of the law being signed? We could all go on, couldn't we? The Bush administration has such a long laundry list of potential material that Colbert didn't even reach back six months.

He did scratch the surface of the echo chamber. Let's give him that. It seems to me somebody else has to pull that temple down around Bush, though -- from the inside. Loyalist regimes do tend to result in those people, too.

Kid B loves it. Son One usually leaves the room in a huff. Kid B loves that too.

I guess my kids are probably a little older than Stephen's are. Just the same, I don't think I could allow Stephen to tuck them in at night.

Stephen Colbert's jabs at what is passed on to American's as journalism are right on target. The ironic thing is that in the long run he will eventually help bring down the buffoonery in TV news that is currently his bread and butter.

Stephen Colbert's monologue at the Press Corps banquet was a brilliant demonstration of true courage and integrity. Colbert got his opportunity, and he didn't shirk his duty to non-truthiness in favor of advancing his career or placating the powers that be; instead, he demonstrated his honest contempt for those powers.

A Voltaire for our times.

I sure as hell hope somebody's got his back.

<<We all have "Colbert opportunities" in our daily lives; let's make the most of them. >>

Maybe April 29 should be declared Dare-to-be-Colbert Day.

Let's face it, most Colbert moments are found on the movie screen; and we weep and we cheer - and we feel better about ourselves for no good reason -for it's all fake.

On rare occasions, I've had the courage of my convictions, I've taken the difficult (and often precarious) path because it was the Right thing to do, but, let's face, most I choose not to rock the boat....or I write letters to the editor :) and consider that my contribution.

Tiny example of a "Colbert opportunity": Years ago, I was in a shoe store with a friend. A mentally challenged girl of about 18 was being abused by the storekeeper; he wouldn't allow her to return some shoes. While I seethed inside, sending evil thought-darts in the general direction of his head, my friend started yelling at him, HOW DARE YOU!! and the storekeeper backed down soooo quickly. I admired that girl.

Stephen Colbert is my hero, but I actually fear for his life. The power mad administration might find a way to crash his plane, or car, or....I hope he watches his back. As to the cluelessness of the press, don't they read Salon or Buzzflash or DailyKos or....

Perhaps they only read what the White House and the big corporations allow them to. Maybe, scary as it seems, they really are stenographers. (Or have the Japanese figured out how to create the ultimate human robot?)

was named Colbert -- by Rene Robert, le Sieur de LaSalle.

Maybe Colbert will drown Bush.

What is missing from Michael Scherer fellating Michael Colbert

is an honest comparison of this to Don Imus's roast of the dope from hope and his hack wife a few years back.

That would have made this an honest piece of writing rather

than the schadenfreude of a frustrated liberal.

I have tried to watch Colbert and Stewart

and the fact is these guys do not know who

to do political humor. Being a smartass

is different from being a true satirist.

As a result, watching them is uncomfortable

and I feel sorry for them thinking themselves

funny when they are being laughed at for being

like the kid who eats bugs on the playground to get

attention.

I watched the hilarious Bush impersonator skit, regarding which Bush seemed no little game. He was impressive as straight man, maintaining both his pride and generosity of spirit, in an overall setting about which he must have been no little wary. Of course. That part really was good fun.

When Colbert came on, the near great and totally gleeful good humor of the previous "impersonating/impersonated" skit had put me in an excited and expectant mood. I had been chortling with laughter, eager for the main event.

After just a few of Colbert's lines, in virtual disbelief that so much of it was not funny, I turned it off. I returned a few times later, catching more bits and pieces of what seemed if not mean spirited humor than outright rue. I figured this might kill Colbert's career, and while not an afficionado, I've remained an interested, open minded fan, hoping he would one day become a gem, one of those people we rely on for consistent humor. I knew that Colbert’s humor was of of the “mindful” type, which I like as well as any. The point for me is to find comedians who can be relied on to be consistently funny, helping us to be at least momentarily free from the tension of life's stress, or to deal with it, exactly...though humor.

The reason that Colbert's audience did not particularly laugh is because Colbert’s content - underneath the irony - often seemed descriptive of the onset of what some believe are "end-times". Colberts text could not but help, irrevocably, to put us in mind of events, processes and their cause, and too many present and future effects descriptive of what’s happened on Bush’s watch, including, but not limited to, further collapse of American values, fragile domestic security, gas prices, global warming, failed political foreign relations, all of a range where danger, warfare, violence, even genocide seem ever more likely, even as Americans watch their own prospects, and their children’s, for health and financial well being go down the drain. Struggle is evermore serious and commonplace unless people are the rich and getting richer.

Colbert cast into sharp view this Administrations gross failure, as George Bush sat a few feet away, in the presence of an audience consisting of the fourth estate, the group charged with helping to keep the world safe from witless or heartless governance, or both. They’re supposed to timely blow the whistle, audibly. And when necessary, be shrill.

It’s been a ring but barely sounded, and, of course, less so heard.

The naked truth of so much shared shame defined the essential pall that hung over the room. The polite as nervous, astonished and embarrassed little smiles and muted laughs, altogether - as my inability to keep the dial tuned to Colbert's gig - bespeak a nation, exactly so, steeped in denial.

Even sadness about these realities does not well keep fright away. it may be too late to fix so much that is now in disarray - even as that inevitably it will cost so much more whenever America rights itself again.

So when I first saw Colbert on the show, it did not seem to me humor, or anything far beyond the pall of a cheap shot that Colbert was bringing to bear, before a captive audience in the room that wasn’t expecting anything heavy. Nor was I. It made me uncomfortable. Nervous. But I thank him now. And should we all, for both his truth and talent. I’m not sure we have to laugh, but we have to do something. I guess once we “see” it for what it is, just the truth, and one that we really can face, it’s okay to laugh a little at the brilliance of Colbert's ironic and rueful presentation of what is all too true: the emperor has no clothes, and with him, we are naked too.

Maybe when and if we are not all so closed to the essential frightfulness of it all, the open-ended trouble which seems so much all the more now lurking everywhere, at the wrong closed and opened doors which have been the policies of this Administration, we’ll laugh a little easier.