Letters to the Editor

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The docile press corps was offended when Stephen Colbert dared to expose Bush's -- and their own -- feet of clay. But how to respond? Voilà: "He wasn't funny."
  • Funny bones

    Funny? As if that were the issue. Colbert's performance was a stunner - I watched it, indeed, everyone I know watched it with a shocked, awed expression on our faces.

    He was crossing lines of humiliation and utter embarrassment - not his own, but the man's on his left - in a way I've never seen before, certainly not in recent memory. Who gives a damn whether he was funny? He was shocking, bracing, in a way that I guess somnolents like Noam Sheiber can't understand. He laughed twice, he said. I gasped a few dozen times at the audacity.

    Get this: Colbert brung it directly to the source. For twenty minutes he cracked the whip over the head of one of the most isolated/buffered presidents in our history.

    That alone is worth more than a thousand laughs.