Things Just Got Real For Colbert

It is a sad statement about the condition of our nation to say that most Americans already know who Stephen Colbert is.  For those who do not, he is—along with Jon Stewart—one of several comedians starring in satirical news shows on Comedy Central.  Ratings prove that more Americans get what they think is news from Stewart and Colbert than get what they think is news from CNN and MSNBC, which may or may not be a good thing, because the only real difference between Jon Stewart and Chris Matthews is that Matthews doesn’t have a live studio audience and an “applause” sign.

As the star of The Colbert Report, Colbert’s gimmick is to play a caricatured exaggeration of what he believes to be the conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly being the most conservative being the very liberal Colbert can conceive of without his head exploding).  Five days a week, Colbert’s team of several dozen Hollywood writers string together half an hour of Democrat talking points disguised as jokes, which Colbert then recites from a teleprompter is if they are his own unique thoughts, thus fooling his gullible audience into believing he is clever and insightful.  Jon Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, and David Letterman all achieve their “comic brilliance” through this exact same process, which is why all of their shows go into reruns whenever there is a writers’ strike.

The results would be merely annoying for conservatives and those with traditional American values, except for the fact that many citizens—especially young Americans, Colbert’s target audience—view him as an intelligent and knowledgeable media personality.  This phenomenon reached dangerous levels of absurdity in 2010 when Colbert was invited to give serious testimony (as his fictional television persona, no less) before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Security, despite a total lack of clarity on where his expertise in the matter came from.  Rather predictably, he had nothing worthwhile to contribute to the hearing, and his jokes fell flat without an assembled audience of college stoners to laugh at him on camera.  Even his Democrat fans on the committee seemed mildly annoyed and embarrassed by the waste of time.

Speaking of embarrassments, Colbert’s most recent jumbling of comedy and politics came when his sister, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, ran against formerly-disgraced Republican Mark Sanford for a South Carolina seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.  Sanford—having previously apparently destroyed his political career when he abandoned his wife for his South American mistress—should have been an easy target for any Democrat to defeat.  Fortunately, Colbert Busch was not just any Democrat, and even with the entire national media and Sanford’s own highly-publicized baggage at her disposal, she was solidly trounced in this week’s election.

Her famous brother, comedian or not, was outraged.  In his statement following the defeat, Stephen had this to say:

“This scares me to my core. I’m shaken. This was the first political campaign where I knew and cared about the candidate before they got into politics. I saw first-hand how her opponents smeared her with outrageous accusations I knew to be untrue. And that’s made me wonder if other campaigns have done this as well.”

Yes, Stephen, it’s absolutely been done before, and it has been for many years.  And worse still, it has been done by you!

Let’s set aside for a moment that Elizabeth Colbert Busch’s campaign theme largely amounted to “Mark Sanford is a jerk and my brother is on TV,” and pretend that Stephen had a point about his sister’s credentials.  Colbert has built his career by doing to conservative politicians exactly what he now angrily accuses her opponents as having done to her.  He made a name for himself by attacking George W. Bush, Republican congressional candidates, the Republican presidential field of 2008, and the Republican challengers to Barack Obama in 2011 and 2012.  Unlike traditional leftwing entertainers, he even launched a political action committee and several faux campaigns to further mettle in the political process.  The Colbert Report itself is nothing more than a collection of half-truths written as jokes for the express purpose of pushing a political agenda.

Colbert, like so many other liberal entertainers, spent all of 2012 trying to convince the American voting public that Mitt Romney was a horrible human being.  Mitt Romney, despite whatever political flaws he might have, is a good and charitable man with a loving and decent family of his own, a deep personal faith, and a penchant for helping others.  But none of this stopped Colbert from working to advance his own political agenda by crafting Romney as the greedy, racist Republican who probably gave his employee’s wife cancer and then laughed when she died.  The only thing that mattered to Colbert was that Barack Obama stayed in office to continue driving an extreme liberal agenda, and if Mitt Romney’s image and that of his family had to be destroyed for that to happen, well then Colbert was only too happy to play his part.

This is where reality finally slapped Colbert upside the head, except even now he seems too deluded to recognize the situation for what it is.  When Mitt Romney and the Republicans are trying to restore fiscal and international sanity to the republic, then they must be demonized by lies in the form of comedy to convince an ignorant public to support Barack Obama.  But when his own sister is the casualty of “politics as usual,” well then suddenly the truth and integrity matter, and obviously no one has more integrity than a Colbert.

It is wishful thinking to hope that a partisan hack who depends on his writers to do his thinking for him might seize upon a revelation here and turn over a new leaf, but at least we can appreciate the bitter hypocritical humor of the situation, and that in itself is smarter comedy than anything The Colbert Report has ever given us.

Original article: Things Just Got Real For Colbert

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