Why I Appreciate the Talented Mr. Colbert

Yes, yes, the Stephen Colbert thing is being handled by far more talented people than myself. I know, so I'm not going to go into it too much. If you haven't seen it, you definitely should, and can find it here. Amy over at Radioactive Quill has been doing a fabulous job compiling articles from both sides of the discussion, interspersed with her own unique, snarky, always entertaining commentary. Head over there if you want deep critique. She has beaten me to the punch and done a far better job than I could have.

I will simply, briefly give my perspective:

I laughed my ass off for almost the entire speech, with the exception of the very end, where it did drag on just a little. I have heard nearly every right-wing gasbag I've listened to since tell me that Stephen was not funny, and I shouldn't have found him funny, because he was just rude. Why was he rude? He was rude because he satirized the president and the administration apologists in the media, cutting 'too close to the bone' (read: too close to the painful truth) while Bush and his spin machine had to sit there and listen, unable to defend themselves. That, I have been told, is just rude.

Bullshit. You know why I don't feel bad for them? I don't feel bad for them because they felt for twenty minutes the way I've felt for four years. Every time the President uses his bully pulpit to claim that he is protecting me, or that Americans don't buy global warming, or that homosexuals are ruining American values by asking for civil treatment, or that fellow Americans are dying in Iraq to fight terrorism, or that the neo-con movement represents mainstream centrist America, I feel just like he did for a mere twenty minutes. Every time Rush Limbaugh pigeonholes those who disagree with him as liberal loons, every time Bill O'Reilly makes up a statistic out of thin air to support a lie, every time Anne Coulter dodges logic with racism, every time Michelle Malkin panders to her nationalist fan base, I have to sit here with the same stony look of anger worn by President Bush for just one third of one hour. They reach millions, and I have nothing but a speck in the blogosphere to use as a sounding board. What they felt for twenty minutes has been boiling inside me since the invasion of Iraq.

If George Bush and the hypocrites in the right-wing media are hurt, they have only themselves to blame. This era of partisanship and refusal to compromise was carefully, willfully ushered in by the very people who want us to feel bad for them now that it's bitten them in the ass. I don't. I can't.