NYT-The Blogosphere Is Alive With the Sound of Colbert Chatter

[kpete]

After Press Dinner, the Blogosphere Is Alive With the Sound of Colbert Chatter

Stephen Colbert performing at the White House correspondents' dinner on Saturday, with his primary foil, President Bush, sitting nearby.


By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: May 3, 2006

Mark Smith, a reporter for The Associated Press who is president of the White House Correspondents' Association, acknowledges that he had not seen much of Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central before he booked him as the main entertainment for the association's annual black-tie dinner on Saturday night. But he says he knew enough about Mr. Colbert — "He not only skewers politicians, he skewers those of us in the media" — to expect that he would cause some good-natured discomfort among the 2,600 guests, many of them politicians and reporters.

What Mr. Smith did not anticipate, he said, was that Mr. Colbert's nearly 20-minute address would become one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere. Mr. Colbert delivered his remarks in character as the Bill O'Reillyesque commentator he plays on "The Colbert Report," although this time his principal foil, President Bush, was just a few feet away.

"There was nothing he said where I would have leapt up to say, 'Stop,' " said Mr. Smith, who introduced Mr. Colbert and sat near him on the dais. "I thought he was very funny," Mr. Smith added, though there was hardly consensus on that point yesterday.

At issue was a heavily nuanced, often ironic performance by Mr. Colbert, who got in many licks at the president — on the invasion of Iraq, on the administration's penchant for secrecy, on domestic eavesdropping — with lines that sounded supportive of Mr. Bush but were quickly revealed to be anything but. And all this after Mr. Colbert tried, at the outset, to soften up the president by mocking his intelligence, saying that he and Mr. Bush were "not so different," by which he meant, he explained, "we're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol."

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/arts/03colb.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[Crankie Avalon]

1. Even before I read the article, just want to say...

...AWESOME PICTURE!!! Both of Colbert and of Bush's reaction. Am saving it. So glad you posted!!!

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

3. That photo is a keeper!!! :)

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

2. Thank you for posting this! It shows that the complicit media couldn't

sweep Stephen under the rug!

Meanwhile, is there a greater whore?


Mary Matalin, a Republican who has served the Bush White House as assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president, had a different take.

"This was predictable, Bush-bashing kind of humor," Ms. Matalin, who was there, said in an interview. Of Mr. Colbert, she said, "Because he is who he is, and everyone likes him, I think this room thought he was going to be more sophisticated and creative."

[Crankie Avalon]

5. She couldn't have made a more pathetic comment...

...precisely because she used the very two words no rightwinger should ever bring up: "Sophisticated" and "creative."

This comes from rightwingers who are so unsophisticated that they actually thought Stephen Colbert was on their side and weren't able to detect his irony until after they finally went even so far as to invite him to their precious event and got pummeled over their heads with it until they finally got it that they were the ones being ridiculed all along. And, if anything more needs to be said about "creativity," I guess nothing is more creative to a rightwinger than a president who has to hire a professional comedian/impersonator to carry his witless ass by helping him make fun of the way he pronounces "nuclear" for him. (I mean, WOW, who else could have thought up such an original "joke"? I'd never heard that one, before!)

Poor Mary Matalin...even when she tries to affect a blase attitude, she just makes herself sound even more like a yokel. O8)

[0007]

4. Colbert came out blazing both guns at junior how could he not be pissed?

I loved every second of it.

My favorite.

That line got a relatively warm laugh, but many others were met with near silence. In one such instance, he criticized reporters for likening Mr. Bush's recent staff changes to "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." "This administration is not sinking," Mr. Colbert said; "this administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg."

[bunny planet]

6. This article would have been the perfect place to insert a sentence

mentioning * comedy routine at the same affair two years ago where he searched for the missing WMDs and everyone in the audience laughed like that was funny and not in the worst taste imaginable. Such hypocrisy should be duly noted but of course it isn't.

[rocktivity]

8. And don't forget that at last year's dinner, Laura Bush mentioned

that her husband had tried to milk a male horse!

:eyes:
rocknation

[Julius Civitatus]

10. Maybe Matalin was defining what Repugs find "funny" and "nuanced"

like bestialism, or sending 2400 young men to their deaths for a lie.

[rocktivity]

7. The blogosphere is, but the mainstream media isn't

including your own Lisa Bumiller. Her original Times story didn't mention Colbert at all, and the rest of the mainstream media either ignored it or grudgingly made a passing reference to it days later. Isn't THAT a more relevant subject for your story?

:headbang:
rocknation

[Julius Civitatus]

9. Elisabeth Bumiller is an embarrassment. Her fawning over Bush is a joke

No wonder she didn't even acknowledge Colbert in her article, while brown nosing the president.

[Tuesday_Morning]

11. Boehlert sez: NYT "arrives safely late".

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/the-new-york-times-arrive_b_20274.html

The New York Times Arrives Safely Late to the Colbert Affair

So the Times today--four days after the fact--finally gets around to acknowledging Stephen Colbert performed at Saturday night's White House Correspondents Assocation dinner and that his performance set off a feverish online debate. (You don't say.) Of course, the center of the online storm, driven by liberals, revolved around how the MSM universally ignored Colbert's performance, in part, because he deftly mocked the assembled press corps for its shrieking timidity during the Bush years, although today's Times dutifully kept that part vague.


The article does note Colbert's sharp-edged routine had "become one of the most hotly debated topics in the politically charged blogosphere." Here's the headline, "After Press Dinner, the Blogosphere Is Alive With the Sound of Colbert Chatter." So the article includes lots of quotes from liberal blogs spelling out their charges, right?

Wrong. The only blog entry the Times quotes is from the centrist New Republic which dismissed the whole controversy, insisting Colbert was ignored because he was simply unfunny. Rest assured Times readers, nothing to see here.

NYT - bunch of out-of-touch wussies!

[UTUSN]

12. If the barb-content outweighed the humor, perhaps that's what we have

needed vis a vis Shrub for SIX years, since Shrub has been spared any direct challenges, anything that would vex him, anything that would make him purse his little lips for all of that time. I forget, did the NYT and the other rehashers criticize sL-IMUS when he slimed the CLINTONS?

We've had entirely too much laughing from Shrub, over the not-finding-WMD, laughing while he's sending people to their deaths for his private cartel war, laugh laugh laugh. Perhaps we need fewer laughs.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

13. This is now the No. 1 MOST emailed NYTimes story

see the list here.

and it's number 4 on the "most blogged" list

and "Colbert" is the no. 2 most searched term on the NYTimes website.

[robbedvoter]

14. "Watermellon: Gallager's performance distasteful, crossed the line"

Bush's routine at the dinner was "Ain't it funny how dumb I am?"

Colbert's routine was "It's not funny how dumb you are."