Stephen Colbert Said What?
30 April 2006 10:18 pm by Taylor Marsh
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| It's just not funny anymore. |
If the media doesn't talk about it did it happen?
It's all about the “Bush Twins.” They “stole the show.”
No one wants to talk about the Republican roast, served up on a platter by
Stephen Colbert. The media wants to talk about the Bush Twins. That good old
boy Bush who can laugh at himself in spite of it all. In spite of the incompetence,
the rising death toll, the war without end, you know, all of it.
“Mission Accomplished” was declared 3 years ago tomorrow. But no
one wants to talk about that reality. In fact, few want to talk about reality
at all. That's because after all these years it seems futile to start reporting
the facts now. But there they are, whether you want to lay them out or not.
President Bush can run. He can hide behind the Bush Twins. But sooner or later
he will have to deal with Stephen Colbert. He's out there listening, waiting,
prepared for the next attack. The truth will not be denied. In fact, it's been
unfurled. Bush's truthiness has been trumped. But does he know it? There's nothing sadder than when the joke's on you, especially if you're the leader of the free world and missed it when it was delivered. Bush can take consolation in one thing: the media missed it too.
LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of “Carrie,”
the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no
exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman
anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted
back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for
a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street Journal
poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a thousand
days to go and no way out.(snip)
“There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the
war,” Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year C.I.A. veteran and an on-camera source
for “60 Minutes,” said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring
from the C.I.A. in fall 2004, Mr. Drumheller has played an important role
in revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's
mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before
Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Mr. Drumheller conveyed vociferous
warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent W.M.D. labs, an Iraqi
émigré known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator.
“The real tragedy of this,” Mr. Drumheller says, “is if they
had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like
coalition, which would have given us the [300,000] to 400,000 troops needed
to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi Army.”Mr. Drumheller says that until the White House “comes to grips with
why it did this” and stops “propping up the original rationale”
for the war, it “will never get out of Iraq.” He is right. But the
White House clings to its discredited fictions even though their expiration
date is fast arriving. There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each
day. The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration
W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats
retake either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate
the investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost
two years.
