Colbert Roundup

Though he spent years on the Daily Show and has been on the air with his own show since last September, Stephen Colbert first leapt into the national spotlight when he as named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people and when he handed George Bush his ass at the Correspondent’s dinner a few weeks ago[1]. There are always a lot of videos of his show online; the following few from the last week are particularly good:

Phone Calls: Wiretapping

Stephen takes to the phones to ease people’s minds about warrantless wiretapping: “Would you rather have your phone tapped or have everyone you love killed by terrorists?” To a caller concerned about loss of privacy, he breaks in with: “It’s just like you people on the left; you complain and you complain until the government Cadillac shows up and then you complain some more … the air conditioning doesn’t work, the doors won’t unlock and it’s headed for a cliff.”

Tim Flannery

This is an interview with the Australian climate change advocate. “I believe what I wanna believe. Welcome to America, my friend.” Stephen lists the countries that didn’t sign the Kyoto treaty—Lichtenstein, Monaco, the US and Australia—and calls them “the coalition of the willing to burn fossil fuels”. Nightmare scenarios just bounce right off of him, as they do for most Americans: “Tim: If the climate changes, Paris could have the climate of Siberia; Stephen: Good riddance.” As usual, Stephen plays the perfect “idiot” straight man, asking the dumb questions posed by those who know nothing of science, but stopping short of shouting Tim down before he makes some excellent points, like this one: “If your doctor says, “If you keep smoking cigarettes and you keep eating hamburgers and you keep getting no exercise, in 20 years time, you’re going to be in trouble, and by the time you start to feel the first effects, when you get your first heart attack, it’s too late. Climate change is a lot like that.”

David Sirota

This is an excellent interview with the author of Hostile Takeover, which is about the big money that has taken over our government. “Stephen: I hear that energy companies are writing our energy policy. Why not? They know about it than anybody else, don’t they? David: It’s the energy policy that’s supposed to regulate what the energy companies are allowed to do.” Even when he doesn’t stoop quite that as low as that, Stephen shows a decent knowledge of American history (good preparation on the part of his writers), which probes Sirota’s grasp of the issue he writes about. Again, he ends up letting Sirota make his point, unlike the O’Reillys of the world that he (Stephen) lampoons: “David: We need to publicly finance elections … Stephen: Ok, comrade, the government pays for the elections … so my tax dollars go to “moonbat wingnut” who wants to make me have a low-flow toilet. David: The problem is that while it may be welfare for politicians … the problem is that someone is already paying for the elections and they’re getting a government that they own. Think of all of the money that went into the political process that was then returned in the form of tens of billions of dollars in payoffs to the companies that provided election funding.”

Know a District: Georgia’s 8th

This is part 24 of the 434 part series, in which Stephen interviews all of the congresspeople in America. This time, he corners a Georgia representative, who was co-sponsor of a bill to put the ten commandments[2] into every courtroom in the country. Stephen naturally asks whether “he can think of any better building—other than a federal courthouse—to hang the ten commandments” and Congressman Westmoreland answers “no”. Then he said that the “ten commandments is not a bad thing for people to understand and respect … and if we were totally without them, we would lose our sense of direction”. Since they seem so important to him, Stephen asks him to list all ten of them and the moron can only list three of them after much deliberation.

Formidable Opponent: Gitmo

In this skit, Stephen debates himself to get to the heart of the issue. In it, he simply reiterates the logic of the administration vis-a-vis the war on terror, American gulags and America’s moral compass. It’s a dialog between right-wing Stephen and left-wing Stephen, who’s put into Gitmo for the purpose of the debate:

Right: We can’t give these guys trials. We don’t have any evidence.
Left: Well, then, how do you know they’re terrorists?
Right: How do you know they’re not?
Left: What about the guys who are innocent?
Right: What about them? [Left-wing Stephen is now in Gitmo himself] After you’ve been tortured and held for four years, how will we look if we declare you innocent now?
Left: But you just said I’m innocent!
Right: You were innocent. Four years in gitmo without trial has changed you. Think about it, what would you do to me if you got a hold of me right now?
Left: I’d fucking kill you! … oh no.
Right: See?
Left: Oh my god, you can’t let me go, you have to keep me in here to keep me from hurting innocent people like me.

At the end, he’s neatly proven both sides of the debate: the US will probably never let these people go and the fact that the US even has these people imprisoned creates far more terrorists than the paltry 400 or so alleged terrorists that they have locked up there.