Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner:
Following a link from Boing-Boing, I watched Stephen Colbert give the keynote address to the White House Correspondents at their annual dinner. I have no idea what possessed them to invite him, and President Bush, to the event, because they should have known he wasn't going to pull any punches in his speech. And he didn't. And it was both hilarious and damning of the failures of both the adminstration and the press that has mostly failed to take them to task.

Colbert plays a right-wing crazy modelled on Bill "Fuckface" O'Reilly on his show, and does it in such a way that skewers both the right and the left when they're being stupid or crazy. Which is often. One of the schticks of his bit is to claim to have or demand from others "balls." It's a macho goof, daring others to have the balls.

But standing up and making fun of a corrupt President and his administration when that President was about five feet away? Spoofing a lackluster media with no sense of humor about itself? Delivering hilarious bon mot after bon mot, not flagging at all when the majority of the room either seemed to not get it or to be turning increasingly hostile? Stephen Colbert really does have balls. Big, swinging brass ones. Shame he's a comedian and not a journalist. We could use a few more journalists with the courage of their convictions that Colbert showed at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.