I didn't think it was possible, but I now love Stephen Colbert even more. He spoke at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner over the weekend, and unleashed a fierce barrage of jokes aimed at the Bush administration, delivered in the character of the blowhard newsman Colbert portrays four nights a week. Colbert stood less than ten feet from the leader of the free world and didn't hold back. He's got balls of titanium. Radioactive titanium. With spikes. He told truth to power. Some of Colbert's quotes from the evening:
On the topic of aircraft carrier landings and New Orleans visits: "No matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."
On the topic of the White House: "Everybody [in the press] asks for personnel changes, so the White House has personnel changes. And then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking, this administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg."
It becomes clear early on that some of the people in the audience are plainly shocked at the roast Colbert is putting on, which is pretty stupid; what did you expect from a guy who hosts a show on Comedy Central that lampoons the president and conservative media? Anyway, the video's well worth watching.
[UPDATE: Some interesting coverage on how various news outlets covered Colbert's performance, or failed to do so.]
Part one:
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Part three:
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Los Angeles, California I'm a twentysomething white male with ambitions to be a professional film critic and generally spend my days getting paid to watch movies and write about it. I try not to think too hard about how I want to build my life around talking about other people's creations and not mine. A compulsive reader and stubborn cineaste, I take an often contrary stance to my more fundamentalist peers and upbringing by celebrating the pursuit of the good, and the Good, in life, love, art and film. If you watched enough episodes of a few TV shows ("The Hungry and the Hunted," "The Cut Man Cometh," "The Body," "Waiting in the Wings," "Out of Gas," "April is the Cruelest Month," "20 Hours in America," "Colonial Day" for starters), you would understand me completely, and you'd also realize that much of my worldview and philosophical insights are heavily influenced by fictional works/programs, and many of the good things I've said in my life are just a regurgitation of someone else's imaginings. I guess I was made to be a film critic. This Month
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Monday, May 1
Jump Down, Turn Around, Pick A Bale Of Truth
by
Dan Carlson
on Mon 01 May 2006 12:03 AM PDT
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Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. — Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. — John Stuart Mill We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget. — G.K. Chesterton We were, for the briefest of moments, something greater than the sum of our uncertain parts; we were youth itself, in all its painful glory and sharp joy. — August Van Zorn There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there's a time when things can go either way. — Stephen King Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town. — Ask the Dust, John Fante |
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