Colbert Unleashed

The internets are abuzz with the rundown of Stephen Colbert's roasting of The Decider, as well as the White House press gaggle, at the annual correspondents' dinner. And rightly so -- Colbert ably eviscerated the whole lot of them, stem to stern, barely concealing his contempt behind a veneer of satire.

Check out the video, mach schnell.

CNN's Headline News has been giving much more coverage to the impersonator whom The Decider shared the dais with briefly, going through the usual faux-self-deprecating folkisms for mass consumption.

But when push came to shove, and someone like Colbert brought their own ammunition, Mister Man apparently was none too pleased.

Colbert also made biting cracks about missing WMDs, “photo ops” on aircraft carriers and at hurricane disasters, melting glaciers and Vice President Cheney shooting people in the face. He advised the crowd, "if anybody needs anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly on into your table numbers and somebody from the N.S.A. will be right over with a cocktail. "

Observing that Bush sticks to his principles, he said, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday - no matter what happened Tuesday."

Yeah, I could see where the truth would get the preznit a bit riled, given as he's used to mere truthiness. But how sad is it when the only people to hold these morons accountable for the damage they've wrought are comedians?

Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was “surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side." He also reflected on the alleged good old days, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story.

Addressing the reporters, he said, "Let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The president makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know--fiction."

Much of the commentary on Colbert's clip, as far as I've seen, revolved around the portion with Helen Thomas, which was okay, but ran a bit long in making its point. To me, the above section -- which was actually fairly early on in the 15-minute segment - is the real money shot. This is a recklessly symbiotic culture at play in Washington -- even the dinner itself drives that point home. It is this clubby, pesudo-collegial atmosphere that gets cultivated, deliberately, by the pols, and it is always at the expense of the wannabe journamalists who let themselves be played as saps, and the ordinary citizens who end up getting lied to, at the very least by omission, because these compromised media chumps have been co-opted into not upsetting the apple cart.

So you have dickheads like Joke Line coming off like some sort of hero maverick riding in on his white horse (which he presumably needed a step-stool to mount, the half-pint motherfucker), declaiming the Democrats' populist impulses. Indeed. How dare the party of the working class even consider returning to its messy, uncorporate, untidy grass roots? How dare they lend credence to the two-thirds of Americans who, despite the incessant filtering of the corporate media and the lying of the think-tank punditocracy, still think that the country needs a serious change in direction? Don't these simps know that Serious Thinkers like Joe Klein know so much better what's good for them?

Klein wallows in his Harry Truman Turnip Day horseshit, apparently unaware of the truest Trumanism of all -- that when faced with the choice of a fake Republican and a real one, usually people will vote for the real one. That is the simple homily that needs to be inscribed in the minds of Klein and the bottom-feeders like him, the self-styled "serious" commentators that have long forgotten what it's like to live paycheck-to-paycheck, to have their jobs outsourced, to have to make a choice between food and insurance, to literally have to worry about losing their house to an HMO if luck doesn't roll their way and their kid breaks a leg or develops a horrible disease.

The other thing Klein and his fellow useful idiots don't seem to realize is that once they're no longer useful as subservient lapdogs for the moneyed opinion-mongering class, they'll be hung out to dry by the very same people whom they fall all over themselves to defend with their "serious" and "nuanced" pronunciamentos.

And that's the real value of Colbert's savage wit, lost as it may have been on all the self-important press wankers in attendance. If they are serious about their professions, about their noble calling, about their tiresome effrontery that their work is somehow special, then they will get inspired and start proving it, by refusing to take shit from an unpopular administration, by investigating its ongoing pile of corruption and cronyism. If they're serious about their profession having the ability to facilitate change, then they have ample opportunity to facilitate change. "The editor made me change it" excuse doesn't really fly when your extra-curricular activities suggest that you may be more concerned with hob-nobbing with the comfortable than afflicting them.

Now, if they're just serious about hanging on to their stupid little party invites and their summer houses in the Hamptons, then they'll just keep doing what they've been doing. In that case, enjoy your shit sandwich, media weasels.