Stephen Colbert roasts, Bush, press corp

[Guest guest]

I've must have watched this 50 times since monday.....

 

 

http://youtube.com/results?search=colbert%20bush%20cspan & sort=title_sort

 

 

The Truthiness Hurts

 

Stephen Colbert's brilliant performance unplugged the Bush

myth machine -- and left the clueless D.C. press corps gaping.

 

By Michael Scherer

 

May 1, 2006 | Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a

dangerous man -- a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist

with boring hair and rimless glasses. It's a wonder the

Secret Service let him so close to the president of the

United States.

 

But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year's most

fawning celebration of the self-importance of the D.C. press

corps, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies

ominously announced, " Tonight, no one is safe. "

 

Colbert is not just another comedian with barbed punch lines

and a racy vocabulary. He is a guerrilla fighter, a master

of the old-world art of irony. For Colbert, the punch line

is just the addendum. The joke is in the setup. The meat of

his act is not in his barbs but his character -- the dry

idiot, " Stephen Colbert, " God-fearing pitchman, patriotic

American, red-blooded pundit and champion of " truthiness. "

" I'm a simple man with a simple mind, " the deadpan Colbert

announced at the dinner. " I hold a simple set of beliefs

that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe

it exists. My gut tells me I live there. "

 

Then he turned to the president of the United States, who

sat tight-lipped just a few feet away. " I stand by this man.

I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only

for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft

carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And

that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to

America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully

staged photo ops in the world. "

 

It was Colbert's crowning moment. His imitation of the

quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott

McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the

ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate.

He reversed and flattened the meaning of the words he spoke.

It's a tactic that cultural critic Greil Marcus once called

the " critical negation that would make it self-evident to

everyone that the world is not as it seems. " Colbert's jokes

attacked not just Bush's policies, but the whole drama and

language of American politics, the phony demonstration of

strength, unity and vision. " The greatest thing about this

man is he's steady, " Colbert continued, in a nod to George

W. Bush. " You know where he stands. He believes the same

thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what

happened Tuesday. "

 

It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark.

We already know that there were no weapons of mass

destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that

Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and

boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official,

patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as

more " truthiness " than truth.

 

Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train

his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture

jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie

Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and

Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the

small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for

television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on

the right-wing message machine.

 

In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such

ironic mockery " détournement, " a word that roughly

translates to " abduction " or " embezzlement. " It was

considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the

frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They

co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and

documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found

objects of popular culture. " Plagiarism is necessary, " wrote

Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his

strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. " Progress

demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing,

plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas,

replaces them with correct ideas. "

[Note that Debord actually copied this from Isidore Ducasse

(the Comte de Lautréamont), ironically leaving it

unaltered.--DC]

 

But nearly half a century later, the ideas of the French, as

evidenced by our " freedom fries, " have not found a welcome

reception in Washington. The city is still not ready for

Colbert. The depth of his attack caused bewilderment on the

face of the president and some of the press, who, like

myopic fish, are used to ignoring the water that sustains

them. Laura Bush did not shake his hand.

 

Political Washington is accustomed to more direct attacks

that follow the rules. We tend to like the bland buffoonery

of Jay Leno or insider jokes that drop lots of names and

enforce everyone's clubby self-satisfaction. (Did you hear

the one about John Boehner at the tanning salon or Duke

Cunningham playing poker at the Watergate?) Similarly, White

House spinmeisters are used to frontal assaults on their

policies, which can be rebutted with a similar set of

talking points. But there is no easy answer for the ironist.

" Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively

negative function, " wrote David Foster Wallace, in his

seminal 1993 essay " E Unibus Pluram. " " It's critical and

destructive, a ground clearing. "

 

So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner

seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes

to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking

forward to spotting Valerie Plame and " American Idol's " Ace

Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak

for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a

tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this

silly conversation. We trade in talking points and

consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for

our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for

reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.

 

A day after he exploded his bomb at the correspondents

dinner, Colbert appeared on CBS's " 60 Minutes, " this time as

himself, an actor, a suburban dad, a man without a red and

blue tie. The real Colbert admitted that he does not let his

children watch his Comedy Central show. " Kids can't

understand irony or sarcasm, and I don't want them to

perceive me as insincere, " Colbert explained. " Because one

night, I'll be putting them to bed and I'll say . . . 'I

love you, honey.' And they'll say, 'I get it. Very dry, Dad.

That's good stuff.' "

 

His point was spot-on. Irony is dangerous and must be

handled with care. But America can rest assured that for the

moment its powers are in good hands. Stephen Colbert, the

current grandmaster of the art, knows exactly what he was doing.

 

Just don't expect him to be invited back to the

correspondents dinner.

 

 

You can bomb the world to pieces

You can't bomb it into peace