Colbert Roasts Bush and the Press

Over the weekend Steven Colbert was the final speaker at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and he took everyone present, including Bush and the so-called Liberal Media, to the woodshed… all in jest, of course — wink, wink. Colbert was funny and biting… it was simply great to see.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.”

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Turning to the war, he declared, "I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

He noted former Ambassador Joseph Wilson in the crowd, just three tables away from Karl Rove, and that he had brought " Valerie Plame." Then, worried that he had named her, he corrected himself, as Bush aides might do, "Uh, I mean… he brought Joseph Wilson’s wife." He might have "dodged the bullet," he said, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wasn’t there.

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Observing that Bush sticks to his principles, he said, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday - no matter what happened Tuesday."

Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was “surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side." In another slap at the news channel, he said: "I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the No Fact Zone. Fox News, I own the copyright on that term."

He also reflected on the alleged good old days for the president, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story.

Addressing the reporters, he said, "Let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The president makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know–fiction."

You can see Colbert’s entire speech, courtesy of YouTube.com, in three parts. Well, it looks like YouTube.com caved and removed the clip. No worries, though. Nearly the entire presentation is available here:

Update: It’s unanimous, Colbert has the biggest huevos this side of King Kong. Read what others are saying:

• Shakespeare’s Sister: If you didn’t see Colbert at the White House Correspondence dinner, you missed something truly amazing.
• Peter Daou: The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was televised on C-Span Saturday evening. Featured entertainer Stephen Colbert delivered a biting rebuke of George W. Bush and the lily-livered press corps. He did it to Bush’s face, unflinching and unbowed by the audience’s muted, humorless response.
• Crooks and Liars: Stephen Colbert spoke tonight at the dinner and lampooned pretty much everything he could think.
• News Hound: The man has guts, folks, because right now in Right Wing Land thousands of fingers are frantically clackety-clacking away, writing insults to post on their favorite conservative websites. They are also dialing right-wing talk shows to call Mr. Colbert every name in the book, threaten him with death and accuse him of besmirching and disrespecting the office of the President of the United States.

Update II: Sadly YouTube.com has removed the videos, and this is the only partial video I’ve been able to find:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/04/29.html

Bush: America’s Worst President

Don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself.

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

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And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq.

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Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off.

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More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

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On September 10th, 2001, [Bush] held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush’s presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush’s simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

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The heart of Bush’s domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush’s father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush’s tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion’s share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration’s original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

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[T]he Bush administration — in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" — threatens to overturn the Framers’ healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress.

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Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."

A Progressive’s Wish List

Here’s a brief list, er, wish list, of items I’d like to see coming from the Democratic party and their national candidates:

Policies

• National commitment to the Energy Apollo Project, to curtail, if not end, our dependence on fossil fuels — I’d also like to see more exploration on alternative energy sources
• No US forces in Iraq, no permanent basis the country
• Rebuild and regain the trust of our nation’s military after the catastrophic abuse of the past six years
• As an aside, and as someone that served in the military, I’d like to see a mandatory — yes, mandatory — military service period for every American after completing high school for a two year period. (Conscientious objectors could serve in non-combat units that are not required to undergo any direct weapons training — our nation must commit to an ideal wherein war must be a shared sacrifice, across the board, period.)
• Heavy investment in our educational system, particularly k-12
• Rekindle our national governments commitment to Social Security, so that the country knows that the systems is solvent and secure
• National healthcare
• A renewed commitment that Americans’ reproductive security and sovereignty will remain a personal matter, even as we acknowledge that abortion should be "rare, safe and legal"
• An increase in the minimum wage
• Strong support for Americans’ right to negotiate job security with their employers through our unions
• Strong incentives (patent protection and other methods) to maintain tech jobs and industry in our shores
• Reforming our nation’s revenue code to curtail payment evasion, and to shore up solvency
• Provide an avenue for undocumented immigrants to join the American mainstream, while simultaneously working with our partners in the Western Hemisphere to curtail the inflow of undocumented immigrants
• Work with Israel, Palestine and the world community to assure that the parties move rapidly towards a two state solution — negotiate a sustainable cease fire
• Recommit to the nuclear non-proliferation treaties
• A renewed commitment of America’s most sacred creed: Equal Protection for All. Yes, all, including gays — there would be no more talk of any anti-American amendments

I could list a couple more, but I want to move on to the issue of style/perception; after all, leadership and politics (as anything else, I suppose), are about substance and style, concrete policy and its veneer (by god, republicans have thought us this lesson… we best learn it). Accordingly, I’d like to see the following in my ideal candidate:

Style

• A transformational leader — someone whose party legacy, for instance, would be said to be: After their administration there were more people calling themselves Liberal than there were before. Take Ronald Reagan, he’s clearly used by conservatives to this day as their standard bearer and the conservative movement uses him to shore up their brand
• My ideal political leader will unabashedly reach to the legacy, language and vision of FDR — the greatest American president of the 20th century –, all the while seeking to build new and lasting coalitions that give shape to an America for the 21st century
• I want someone that does not shy away nor cower before the attacks from the conservative movement; rather, I would like my political leader to respond to any challenges from the right as FDR once did:

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.

• I want a leader that understands and respects that we ALL belong to the American family, no matter our ethnic group nor religion; moreover, while we belong to one single American family, the way forward is to be good neighbors within the international community — I want a leader that will seek to build collaborative relations with our partners (no more unileteralism; of course, we retain a monopoly over our national defense)
• I want a leader that will make rebuilding the Democratic and the Liberal/Progressive brand a priority

Roosevelt the Liberal

Roosevelt was an astute Liberal AND pragmatic politician. Many have tried to down play and even obscure his Liberalism, which, of course, given the period, was different than the post-Civil Rights era Liberalism that many of us see in our mind’s eye when we think of a Liberal. However, Roosevelt was a Liberal, even if his agenda was incremental, and, yes, he was also a pragmatist — the two, Liberal and a pragmatist, are not mutually exclusive.

In The Second Bill of Rights, Cass Sunstein writes:

During his last year, Roosevelt concluded that America’s system of political parties needed to be fundamentally altered. He told his principle speechwriter, Samuel Rosenman, that "the time has come for the Democratic party to get rid of its reactionary elements in the South, and to attract to it the Liberals in the Republican party… We ought to have two real parties — one liberal and one conservative." To this end, Roosevelt started negotiations with Wendell Wilkie, the 1940 Republican presidential candidate, stating that with "the liberals of both parties Wilkie and I together can form a new, really liberal party in America." Wilkie responded quite favorably, saying that he was "ready to devote almost full time to this." But both men were dead within the year, and the project was orphaned. [page 16]

Just imagine if their vision had been pursued.

As an observer of politics, to me is quite interesting how Republicans build and build on their brand and figures, while we, Democrats, run away from ours. Republicans have and will continue to spend a lot energy into building shrines for Reagan, because they know that he represents an extension of their brand, a way to reach out and to convert. We, in the other hand, have nearly forgotten the legacy of Roosevelt and how it was during that period that the Democratic party enjoyed its greatest electoral success. Sure, there’s the issue of "big government," "entitlements," "social security reform," and how removed we now are from Roosevelt’s era. The "ideas" that Roosevelt articulated in his Second Bill of Rights still resonate:

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

In the 80s and 90s the Democratic party choose to abandon its storied legacy and, in stead, embraced the corporatist DLC messaging/agenda as the "third way," which they presented as the way forward for the Democratic party. Now, after witnessing how this so-called third way has utterly failed to capture the imagination and hearts of the American people, I would hope that we start to look at the Democratic champions of the past that managed to govern successfully, AND that also managed to build broad-movement coalitions under the party’s banner.

What Liberal Media!?

And still the deluded and/or willfully uninformed remain convinced that there exists in this country a Liberal media:

Wait!

Stop the presses!

Time magazine wins the Ryan-Republican ‘party affiliation that dare not speak its name’ award, knocking the AP back into a distant second.

As we mentioned earlier, the AP really, really didn’t seem to want to mention that George Ryan, the former Illinois governor convicted of corruption today, is a Republican. The AP waited until the very end of the article to note that Ryan is from the GOP.

Time never got around to mentioning it. But that alone didn’t get them so clearly into the winner’s circle.

While failing to mention the party affiliation of the guy who got indicted, they did manage to have this as the second sentence of the article…

On Monday, former Governor George Ryan, 72, became the third of the state’s last six governors to be convicted of political misdeeds, and the current administration of Democrat Rod Blagojevich is also being investigated.

It’s almost a tour de force of party ID bamboozlement. Time, we salute you!