Hey Dick,

I've read a couple of your columns, and you are right about one thing - your are definitely not funny! I thought Stephen Colbert was funny given his audience. Many of us in reality land, after watching the video tape, thought he was funny. Not hilarious, but some chuckles.

But, to me and many others, he is a hero. He used irony to do skewer King Bush, his administration, and the impotent (by choice) Whitehouse Press Corp. Your a big important writer, so you may actually get this - Mr. Colbert has guts. He made more people squirm and uncomfortable in less than an hour on Saturday night than the "Main Stream Media" has in five plus years. They deserved it! And, it took guts, especially to do it in person, unlike how you columnists work. Good for him!

Was he rude? No more than Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Dubya when they are on stage. Colbert was actually doing his act, unlike Don, Dick, and Dub. These three guys insult me and most americans, and deserve to be insulted. But, I do understand your jealousy, since you are one of the gutless MSM. So keep on marching in locked step. When you work for the Administration's propaganda machine, the Washington Post, what can you do? You got to get paid, right? So, pick on Colbert. We know you won't pick on King George and his court. They might just come get you. You should be proud of yourself and your comrades. Gutless is as gutless does!

"That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter." --A Modest Proposal

Funny? Famous. In light of this, we can only ask: did Colbert go far enough?

Thank you Stephen Colbert.

Hi Richard,

How are you? I just wanted to drop a comment on your editorial column regarding Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I saw his performance and I thought the jokes were fairly funny. Not fall-down hilarious, but pretty funny all the same. However, I also feel that his performance was the most politically brave and necessary action taken by any public figure -- entertainer, politician, or journalist -- since before 9/11.

George Bush was made to listen to a litany of inconvenient facts that he, his Administration, and media figures -- including yourself, on many occassions -- have tried to gloss over or deny. The weapons of mass destruction did not exist. Bush's appearances in Manhattan, on an aircraft carrier, in New Orleans -- these were staged photo opportunities, not evidence of real leadership in any way. The media's passive, supine compliance in preventing the public from learning any truths beyond the tightly packaged talking points from the Administration, represents an affront to our cherished democracy.

Stephen Colbert stepped on stage and sent a cold blast of fresh air into the stultified mass of back-slappers and sycophants that make up the current Administration and its co-dependent lapdogs in the press. Perhaps you didn't laugh at the jokes or found them rude because you were among the targets. The Washington Post ran dozens of articles pressing the case for the war without the necessary and required fact-checking and journalistic follow-through to determine the truth: the WMD did not exist, war was not justified, we were making a huge mistake.

Rather than spouting off a few hundred words about how bad you thought Colbert's performance was as a comedy routine, or how rude it was for daring to present a collection of uncomfortable truths to our excessively comfortable President, I would have preferred an honest assessment of the challenges made by Colbert to you in the press. I think a much broader and enlightening article would be one that examined the media's gross failures prior to and during the Iraq war, and why for example your newspaper so readily accepted government statements as established fact without any corroborating sources whatsoever.

You are not exempt from criticism on this issue, Mr. Cohen. Please re-read your essay of Feb. 6, 2003, which contains this wisdom:

"The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise.

[...]

But the case Powell laid out regarding chemical and biological weapons was so strong -- so convincing -- it hardly mattered that nukes may be years away, and thank God for that. In effect, he was telling the French and the Russians what could happen -- what would happen -- if the United Nations did not do what it said it would and hold Saddam Hussein accountable for, in effect, being Saddam Hussein.

The French, though, are so far deaf to such logic. Their foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, said that the consequences of war are dire and unpredictable. He is right about that. But the consequences of doing nothing -- and mere containment of Iraq amounts to nothing -- are also dire and somewhat predictable."

A little more fact-checking, and a little less breathless, unthinking acceptance, would have revealed that the intelligence community actually believed Saddam did not have WMDs, that sanctions were holding and were preferable to a pre-emptive war, and that Saddam was, indeed, not a serious threat to the United States of America. The media -- including you -- ignored this important angle to the story entirely and partly as a result many thousands of young Americans are dead or wounded. Iraq has no dictator, but instead it is rife with social disorder, endless murdering, Islamo-fascism, a resurgent al Qaeda, corruption, sex trafficking, and misery.

The bottom line, then, Mr. Cohen, is this: Stephen Colbert may have been rude to the President. Perhaps his routine wasn't as hilariously funny as it might have been. However, when it comes to speaking the truth, to being unafraid to challenge the President on such truths, and to standing up for the millions of Americans who have been waiting in unrequited earnest to see someone -- anyone -- in the media challenge the President with these inconvenient truths, Stephen Colbert proved braver and more apt than you or any other Washinton Post employee has been at any point in the Bush Administration. Why don't you write a column about that, and leave the comedy critiques to someone else?

Sincerely,

Kevin M. Hebert