{"id":1950,"date":"2006-04-30T23:20:29","date_gmt":"2006-05-01T03:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2006\/04\/colbert_roasts_bush\/"},"modified":"2006-04-30T23:20:29","modified_gmt":"2006-05-01T03:20:29","slug":"colbert_roasts_bush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2006\/04\/colbert_roasts_bush\/","title":{"rendered":"Colbert Roasts Bush"},"content":{"rendered":"

In case you missed Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, you can view it here:
\nPart 1<\/a>
\nPart 2<\/a>
\nPart 3<\/a>
\nIt’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.”
\nBillmon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/a> notes over at the Huffington Post.
\nColbert 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And there was a lot of charges that short routine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1950","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}