Interesting how the MSM courtier class has reacted to Stephen Colbert’s roasting of the President Saturday night–it’s as if it didn’t happen. From the Daou Report:
This is the power of the media to choose the news, to decide when and
how to shield Bush from negative publicity. Sins of omission can be
just as bad as sins of commission. And speaking of a sycophantic media
establishment bending over backwards to accommodate this White House and to regurgitate pro-GOP and anti-Dem spin, I urge readers to pick up a copy of Eric Boehlert’s new book, Lapdogs.
It’s a powerful indictment of the media’s timidity during the Bush
presidency. Boehlert rips away the facade of a "liberal media" and
exposes the invertebrates masquerading as journalists who have allowed
and enabled the Bush administration’s many transgressions to go
unchecked, under-reported, or unquestioned.
It was a remarkable, perhaps unprecedented, ten minutes in which
this president, who is so insulated from the
consequences of his actions, to have been finally, vehemently
confronted. The text of his Swiftian lampoon is pretty much everywhere available on the web, but nowhere available in the print and electronic
media, because the media are as uncomfortable with it as the President must be. This was not your typical good-natured roast. This was a skewering, and then a slow, twisting rotation in the fire.
Did Colbert cross a line? Hardly. The president is an elected (sort of) representative–he’s not royalty. He is an employee of the citizens of the United States. The business of respecting the office if not the man is an absurd idol of the mind in a republican system of government. He deserves as much respect as he’s earned.
He is quite possibly the worst president this country has ever elected, and we will be living with the consequences of his folly for years to come. Will he be paying? Or will he, when he leaves office, lead a life of continued insulation and delusion, propped up by his family’s retainers. My hat is off to Colbert for speaking truth to power, both the power of the presidency and the power of the collusive corporate media, in an atmosphere that had to be as uncomfortable for Colbert as it was for everyone else. It may be the last time it ever happens to him.
Update: I think another point to be made about Colbert is that he refused to be coopted. Think how tempting it would be to be considered one of that elite crowd. When I was talking to my son later today about it, he asked, "Why in the world did they even invite him in the first place." And I think the only answer is that they invited him in the hope of de-fanging him with the honor of just being invited. It’s the logic of the upwardly mobile careerist that is the only rock solid law upon which all other behavior is to be understood in Beltway Culture. What Colbert did is incomprehensible in Beltway Think. "How ungrateful," think the elite, when they condescend to offer membership to a commoner, and it is refused. Colbert clearly is grounded elsewhere.
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