The BBC reported yesterday on George W Bush’s appearance at the White House Correspondent’s Association annual dinner with an impersonator, where he lampooned his own inability to string together an intelligible sentence. Well done BBC, but they missed the main story from that dinner. Missed it, or buried it.
Stephen Colbert, a faux right-wing religious political commentator who normally broadcasts on Comedy Central, had the final speech of the dinner and set about one of the most scorching public attacks on the Bush administration ever seen… while he was five yards away from the President himself, on live TV. See footage here. Highlights include:
- “I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least, and by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq”
- “Now, I know there’s some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias”
- “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”
- “I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story, the President’s side and the Vice President’s side.
But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they’re superdepressing.”
I’m having difficulty believing that Colbert would have been permitted to speak had the content of his speech been known, and also that we would see anything similar happening with Tony Blair in this country. Bush was not smiling towards the end of the speech, and the BBC appears to have done as effective a job as most of the mainstream US media of hiding the story.
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