Public Citizen on Colbert Report Tonight

02:30 PM May 16, 2006

From Public Citizen, perhaps our most energetic user, comes word that Energy Director Tyson Slocum will hold forth on the Colbert Report tonight. (link goes to a promo page with relevant uses of most of our action tools)

Denizens of the Imperial's pokey capital are as likely to get Tyson's proposal for a windfall tax on oil profits as they are Colbert's humor. Certainly few springtime sports made better viewing hereabouts than the righteous huffpuffery over Colbert's appropriation of the fool's right to speak freely or the pecksniffing critiques of his wanting humor and courage by the most sanctimonious chickenshits you'll ever want to meet. "Colbert" and "Stephen Colbert" were 1-2 in Technorati searches for a solid week after he flayed the White House correspondents, and there's an elite more-or-less consensus that he bombed, bored and disappeared. Just what you'd expect, really. As Billmon put it:

Colbert's real sin wasn't lese majesty, it was inserting a brief moment of honesty into an event based upon a lie -- one considered socially necessary by the political powers that be, but still, a lie.

Like its upscale sibling, the annual Gridiron Club dinner, the White House Correspondents dinner is a ritual designed, at least implicitly, to showcase the underlying unity of our Beltway elites. It's supposed to demonstrate that no matter how ferocious their battles may appear on the surface, political opponents can still gather in the same room and break bread, with the corporate media acting as the properly neutral host. It's a relic of the good old days of centrism and bipartisan log rolling ("the end of ideology"), visible proof that in the American system, there may be enemies, but there are no mortal enemies. And so last night we had Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame sitting at one table, Karl Rove at another, and no knives were drawn.

The light entertainment at these events is also supposed to reflect the same spirit of forced good cheer, to the point where even matters of deadly seriousness -- things that in other countries might cause governments to fall -- are treated like inside jokes, as with Shrub's looking-for-the-missing-WMDs-under-the-couch routine. Ha ha ha. We're all friends here!

Maybe the most shocking thing to me about Washington when I interned here years ago was the degree of collegiality between ostensible ideological foes over issues of utmost importance. The conscious solidarity of a ruling class against the unwashed is palpable, and given the overall feebleness and ignorance of that class, both appalling and hilarious. For all his idiocy, for all his crimes, Bush has never transgressed that solidarity, never caught up the establishment in a position it understands as ridiculous as did l'affaire Lewinsky.

(Richard Cohen -- a more determinedly establishmentarian blowhard you will seek long to find -- was nicely undressed yesterday for his anti-Colbert droppings by Ken Silverstein in the harpers.org blog Washington Babylon.)

But the theme sure is spreading. First the jesters, then the gladiators -- Joey Porter of the Pittsburgh Steelers is planning to use the rote NFL champions' White House visit June 2 to offer the president a piece of his mind. Super Bowl XL may have been a heist, but hey, my team's quarterback stumped for Bush in '04. Maybe that bogus holding penalty happened for a higher purpose. (Update:  or not.)

Anyway. Check your local listings tonight, or your preferred bittorrent servers tomorrow.

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