In case you missed Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, you can view it here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
It’s one thing to take on someone in a TV show. But to ridicule the press and the President of the United States in their face takes “muchos huevos grandes.”
Billmon:
Colbert’s routine was designed to draw blood — as good political satire should. It seemed obvious, at least to me, that he didn’t just despise his audience, he hated it. While that hardly merits comment here in Left Blogostan, White House elites clearly aren’t used to having such contempt thrown in their faces at one of their most cherished self-congratulatory events. So it’s no surprise the scribes have tried hard to expunge it from the semi-official record — as Peter Daou notes over at the Huffington Post.
Colbert used satire the way it’s used in more openly authoritarian societies: as a political weapon, a device for raising issues that can’t be addressed directly. He dragged out all the unmentionables — the Iraq lies, the secret prisons, the illegal spying, the neutered stupidity of the lapdog press — and made it pretty clear that he wasn’t really laughing at them, much less with them. It may have been comedy, but it also sounded like a bill of indictment, and everybody understood the charges.
And there was a lot of charges that short routine.