If you haven’t seen this already, you should. At the White House Press Correspondents Dinner this past weekend, Stephen Colbert was the keynote speaker. And he basically turned it into a roast of the President of the United States of America. While there are a lot of Bush critics out there, Colbert actually got to say it to his face, looking him directly in the eyes. Of course it was thinly veiled sarcasm, but still!
His speech was about half an hour long, which makes it too long for YouTube, except in parts, so here’s a torrent of the whole thing off of C-SPAN. It’s sort of hard to watch, actually, but I watched it twice anyway. You get the feeling he’s going too far. He facetiously pans critics for relying on “facts” and not trusting their “gut” like the president does. He “admires” the president for not listening to polls, which are based on liberally biased “reality,” and for creating the most impressively staged photo ops in the world. He also takes issue with the press for all of a sudden paying attention to issues, unlike a few years ago when they ignored WMDs and the reasons for going to Iraq.
It was better than someone insulting the president to his face, because then he could have just walked away, and had the secret service take him out. This was supposed to be light entertainment. Instead, the president is sitting there, blushing, getting skewered with a banquet hall full of stunned onlookers. Colbert’s actually saying this stuff! Did he get a different speech vetted, and switched it at the last second a la Martin Lawrence on SNL? It really reminded me of Stephen Fry’s character in Vendetta, who’s a television host that lampoons the president on national television, and then gets kidnapped by the secret police. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out the same way.
The White House is spinning this by saying Colbert wasn’t funny, and that he had a hard time following the president who apparently killed with his duet with a Bush impersonator. Watch it for yourself. The video is probably the most shared torrent I’ve ever come across. It’ll download in no time.
I loved Colbert on it, someone needs to have the stones to through the facts out there.
Complain all you want but were the points he made wrong? He stood up and told the truth, somthing the media should be ashamed that they don’t do.