This Cracks Me Up

"But what's Colbert's larger point, or what's the point that cannot be accomplished by remaining on the satirical sidelines? Oh sure, he seems ready and poised to spoof arrogant and self-centered politicians, a natural spillover from his Bill O'Reilly act. But mock self-centeredness is still, in his case, merely self-centeredness. His ostensible expos¿ of others seems hardly more than a ruse for self-serving self-aggrandizement, for both his on-screen and off-screen characters."

Talk about going negative!

Andrew Sullivan pays tribute to Colbert and "a parody as lovingly accurate as all great parodies are. The show's graphics include countless American flags and a swooping, screeching eagle; the regular features include an ominous 'Threatdown' of dangers facing the American people, and a daily harangue called The Word. In style and substance, Colbert has mastered the art of total and absolute certainty regardless of the facts that has become a hallmark of the Bush era. Before long, after all, if you don't cry, you feel the need to laugh.

"Colbert even invented a new word that became 2006's word of the year, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary: 'truthiness'. It's the truth according to the gut instinct of the president . . .

"But the bipartisan guest list cannot disguise the anti-establishment, liberal bent of the show. Yes, [Jon] Stewart and Colbert rib the Democrats. Their coverage of the 2004 primaries was framed with the title 'The Race from the White House'. But with Bush in charge of things, the targets for liberal humour have been unusually plentiful.

"Stewart skewers Bushism directly; Colbert achieves his edge by out-Bushing Bush. He does so with total deadpan sincerity, almost never breaking for a second out of character. My first time on the show, he sat me down and posed the first question: 'How old were you when you chose to be gay?' . . .

"As the religion-drenched era of Republican hegemony wanes a little, the satirists begin to become part of the establishment themselves. Colbert's presidential run may be a step too far. Perhaps, in retrospect, these last, ragged months of the Bush administration will come to seem the high-water mark of the Colbert-Stewart tide."

Not if those drunken college students have anything to say about it. But I do wonder how the shows might change under a Hillary administration.

Now to Sunday night's Fox debate. The New Republic's Noam Scheiber sees the top-tier Republicans divided into two camps:

"So which approach was more successful: the Romney/Thompson appeal to ideological purity or the McCain/Giuliani embrace of authenticity? I'm not entirely sure, but I think a few observations are relevant here. First, the advantage of the authenticity gambit is that it makes a candidate look and sound comfortable in his own skin, whereas the ideological purist must steel himself for the inevitable 'gotcha' moment. McCain seemed as close to capturing the magnetism of his 2000 campaign as I've seen this year; Giuliani flashed his quick wit multiple times to the delight of the crowd. (One applause line: 'I did 210 weddings when I was mayor of New York City . . . They were all men and women. I hope. You got to give me a little slack here. It was New York City, you know.')

"Though Romney and Thompson weren't exactly hemming and hawing--Thompson got off one of the better quips of the night, a shot at Ted Kennedy's girth in which he suggested it would be tough to get to the left or the right of the Massachusetts senator--they exhibited a low-grade defensiveness throughout.

"The second observation has to do with Romney in particular, for whom the disjunction between his conservative packaging and his moderate instincts is more pronounced . . .