Stephen Colbert's roasting of President Bush at the White House Correspondents Association dinner has been largely met with silence by what is known as the mainstream press. Colbert's speech was painful, rude, funny, insulting...and deadly true.
Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, has taken exception to Colbert's remarks here. Cohen is no Bush supporter; nonetheless, he says that Colbert went way too far, over the top, and insulted the president when he had no opportunity to respond.
Besides, First Lady Laura Bush was present.
C'mon, Cohen, give us a break!
I admit that Colbert's routine made me squirm. Colbert nailed the president's 'just a regular guy' act, the carefully scripted image of a simple man with simple, fixed beliefs of right and wrong and good and bad, a man who goes with his gut on matters of foreign and domestic policy.
The trouble is, Bush buys his own act. He doesn't seem to remember that it's a routine that Karl Rove cooked up for him. As Colbert says, Bush is a man who truly believes on Wednesday what he believed on Monday, no matter what happens on Tuesday.
This 'just plain Joe' image of a president who spends his vacations clearing brush has played well with the electorate and with the televsion crowd, an image reassuring enough to get him elected twice...with a little help from the Supreme Court and state election officials with their fat thumbs on the voting scales.
And finally it is beginning to come apart. The public is beginning to see through it all, sees that they have been had. George Bush is way over his head and way out of his league. The public is grasping, finally, that, as they say in my native Texas, Bush is all hat and no cattle.
Further, it's beginning to sink in that Bush and his top advisers have a very frightening concept of the separation of powers and the responsibilities of Congress, not to speak of the strictures of the Constitution.
What's really scary is Bush doesn't even know how far off the Constitutional reservation he has strayed.
This is all beside the point, Cohen seems to say. Cohen says it's unseemly to be so rude, so brutal, and so tactless with the president when he can't fight back.
Good grief! Does Cohen really think we are in the middle of a fair fight?
What the Bush administration engages in is not policy or even politics as ordinarily understood. What the Bush Administration puts out is not policy discourse but endless political propaganda, or what Colbert calls 'truthiness.'
Colbert invented the term "truthiness" to point to how the news from the White House is filled with hot air and propaganda and almost utterly devoid of facts and evidence. Truthy words are words that "feel" truthful and that "sound" truthful but are in reality anything but. Being "truthy" is stringing together words and sentences that massage the electorates prejudices and feelings while at the same time diverting their attention from the cold, hard evidence, far away from seriousness and far, far away from reality.
"Truthy" is another term for what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls "bullshit," or
the use of speech to divert attention from reality and evidence, the kind of talk and image that you find in far too much modern advertising. Truthy politics is politics as advertising and deceptive advertising at that.
All politics has a high bullshit content but the Bush administration's whole bit is nothing but truthy bullshit. As one former disenchanted Bush White House official, John DiIulio, said long ago, serious policy discussion and debate are dead with the Bush crowd.
Bush has succeeded precisely because his
tightly-scripted "truthiness" act is seldom penetrated out in plain view for the whole world to see by the national media. This bullshit patter serves as a diversion from the world
of facts and evidence, the world of, say, Iraq on the ground or
New Orleans under water or the waning economic prospects of far too many people in the U.S. who aren't rich.
The White House correspondents almost never call the administration's hand on this blather, fearing that their press passes will be pulled or that their corporate bosses may threaten. Apparently only Helen Thomas has any balls in that crowd.
The correspondents mostly take what the administration passes out and prints it, "balancing" that with what the other side "might say" in response, often with a "there they go again" twist. This is not impartiality or balance; this is laying down when the other side is engaging in "truthy" bullshit.
What President Bush needs right now is a strong dose of rude,
insulting reality to convince him that his 'truthiness' act isn't
working anymore. Bush's needs roughing up and in public. Colbert roughed him up and in public.
In my view, Colbert was asked by the White House correspondents to host the roast precisely because they knew he would have the courage to say and do what they would never do: speak a mocking, scalding truth in the face of abusive power, and all in plain view precisely where his truthy minions can't protect him.
Cohen says that "speaking truth to power" no longer means facing the consequences, taking the chance that might will smite you. Cohen believes that Colbert was just taking a cheap shot with little chance of anything bad happening.
But isn't it the point that the White House correspondents almost never take the shot because power might smite them, or at least take away their press pass?
George Bush and his administration lied to the American people repeatedly about why we were going to war in Iraq. As a result thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands Iraqis, have lost their lives and countless more are maimed for life. Iraq is sinking in a civil war and instead of the Administration facing reality and finding an exit strategy their next stop now seems to be Iran.
Sure, Colbert was insulting and rude but Bush deserves every painful moment of it, and much, much more.
Comments