The president was not amused, and the applause from the “stenographers” in the audience indicated that they were increasingly not amused either, except for Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, sitting at one of the tables, clearly enjoying themselves, and Helen Thomas, a co-conspirator, sitting at the head table, very amused. Colbert spared no one that night, not the journalists, not the president, not the generals nor the Supreme Court justices, whether they were in the room or not.
C-SPAN was also, apparently, not amused. The footage of the dinner was aired many times but after a relatively short period of time, somehow the video got edited and Colbert’s speech was removed from further rebroadcasts. Not only that, they demanded that YouTube remove clips of the video from their site, after which Google purchased rights and put it on their video site.
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune reported on the dinner but made no mention of the Colbert speech. So the journalists and/or editors there were not amused either, I guess.
But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.
From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.
But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.
Stephen Colbert At The White House Correspondents Dinner. (by Capriluveda)
Where Did the Debt Come From? (by seeprogress)
I think I agree with Bill Maher here for the most part… it is rather ridiculous to me that Americans seemingly rejected the new Sun Chips biodegradable bag because it was “too loud”! I mean, what is more important, the environment or being able to eat chips out of a bag silently? I can understand maybe in a movie theater or live play, but in those situations you could just use another container as Mr. Maher so eloquently points out in his closing monologue….
