ASYLUM

* Colbert

So, I watched Stephen Colbert ripping both the Media and President Bush a new asshole (like they don't have enough assholes already). It was amazing. I know, everyone's already chimed in about this already, but still. A lot of what I'm reading seems to miss several things.

The sickly-safe "two Bushes" performance beforehand? That many reporters, describe as "stealing the show"? Weak, obvious, unfunny, and... c'mon...

"That one's pretending to be the President; the other one's the impersonator."

Thank you, I'm here all week.

Blackout?

I don't think it was a conscious blackout, I think it was a question of not knowing how to deal with it, and it taking some time to recover from the "shock and awe". Can you see Fox News going ahead and announcing, "Saturday: Colbert accuses Fox of shoddy, biased reporting in stinging 25-minute rebuke of Bush Administration, and the journalistic weakness that supports it"?

They needed to batten down the hatches, formulate a response, convince themselves of it, and generally reinforce their Big Lie self-image as "Fair and Balanced" (snicker snicker — yes, I know, easy target, but still) before they could say anything.

(I'm sure individuals got over it pretty quick — well, mostly — but on a corporate level, these things bubble through slowly.)

Talking of journalistic weakness, Hunter S Thompson once wrote (on the subject of Nixon — of course) something still deeply relevant:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Not funny?

"It wasn't funny". The current favoured critical response. To which I say, "That's because you were expecting to laugh with your gut, not with your head." A better question to ask is "Was Colbert entertaining?" To which the answer was a resounding yes. Even if you didn't find him funny, and humour is very much a metter of taste, the sheer schadenfreude spectacle of the event was entertainment gold, and taken as a whole, it lightened my very soul.

Crossing the line?

"Colbert crossed the line!" Which line? If "the line" is rudeness, he was certainly rude. And a damn good thing too. Boo hoo. I mean, I can understand not wanting to invite him back next year. I can see the eBay feedback now: "Did not receive what I expected. Would not do business with again." But for the (much, much, much larger) audience outside of the room, it was superb.

What other "line" might they mean? if "the line" is poor taste, bzzt again. Bush's schtick last year, hunting under tables for WMDs, was poor taste.

Imagine for a moment that, even completely accidentally, with the best will in the world (I'm being unreasonably charitable to the Bush Administration here with this analogy), the police accidentally shot a relative of yours. They thought he or she was a criminal who posed a threat to the public. They thought he or she was reaching for a gun. It turned out that there was no gun. There wasn't even a gun-shaped object — no replicas, no novelty cigarette-lighters, not even a banana.

Now imagine the police commander — not the man who actually pulled the trigger, but the one who gave the shoot-to-kill orders — refuses to apologize. Not only that, but he actually, during a TV interview, does a comedy routine where he rifles through the host's pockets pretending to look for a gun. How would you feel about that?

Now imagine that somewhere around 35 to 40 thousand had been killed, instead of just one person. Does that make it better, or worse, taste?

Now imagine that the commander claimed to be above the law, and could shoot anyone he damn well pleased any time he liked? Without evidence? How does that make you feel about him laughing off the lack of evidence?

Where was that line, again?