COLBERT BOMBED?: Not to those who saw the video online |
The story was quickly spun by mainstream-media members, who explained away their own weak-kneed response by informing us that Colbert bombed. Like hell he did. A huge portion of the nation roared approval when it either watched him on C-SPAN or saw or read his remarks online.The biggest laugh of all came when Bush’s talking-head defense team agonized over whether Colbert had gone too far by smuggling truth disguised as satire into a gathering of media and politicos in Washington, DC. They were also concerned that the president was subjected to 15 minutes of public discomfort as he sat trapped on the dais, characteristically devoid of an exit strategy. While the most powerful mouse in the world sat glowering, the courageous Colbert stayed in character and on point. The only way that quarter-hour could have been more magnificent would have been if Bush had been forced to watch the Comedy Central star while treading raw sewage in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Always ready indeed
In a spring dominated by fiction, one truth emerged. Our war president always, always sends the National Guard where it doesn’t belong. Already stop-lossed into extreme disrepair as temp workers in Bush’s perpetual occupation of Iraq, the Guard was handed a new assignment: secure the Mexican border. Dubyahoo announced the deployment during yet another speech deemed crucial by the media.
The custom goes thusly: Bush’s public standing nose-dives, some simmering issue gets magnified to distract us from more serious problems, and then word comes from the White House that the president is going to take his case to the American people. It’s once again make-or-break time and it’s all on the line. Bush then delivers a factually bereft assessment of the latest crisis and closes by reminding us that God is guiding us towards freedom. In this case, the price of freedom will be paid by troops who should be loading the sandbags, rather than the guns, of August.
But Bush’s move makes political sense, at least for him. This very month, Mexicans have reacted to what looks to be a rigged presidential election by quickly and clearly documenting electoral fraud. At one point, 500 people reportedly surrounded 10 Mexican election officials they caught red-state-handed vote tampering in the Tabasco town of Comalcalco before they could disappear ballots that overwhelmingly favored alleged loser Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Obrador’s purported defeat came by the razor-wire-thin margin of 0.6 percent of the vote. Despite what you might read in the New York Times (which has a south-of-the-border editorial policy that would lead one to believe it’s a sister paper of the Washington Times), the populace is in an uproar and this thing is far from over.
Bush sure as hell doesn’t want Mexicans making their way to places like Ohio to spread their backward ideas about one person, one vote.
(For more on Ohio, be sure to read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s painstakingly researched Rolling Stone piece, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” For the scoop on Mexico, support the campaign for authentic journalism being waged by former Phoenix staffer Al Giordano on his vital Web site, the Narco News Bulletin.)
