RJ Eskow has a nice little post that supplements my Class Warfare piece of last week and dovetails with the piece yesterday about how Colbert "event" has become one of those things insiders have decided to pretend didn't happen. Not one mention of it in Elizabeth Bumiller's story about the dinner in the NY Times. But here's Eskow:
Here are a few recent news items that tie together nicely: Mike McCurry flacking for corporate control of the Internet, the White House press corps offended that Stephen Colbert spoiled their little love fest, and Hillary Clinton schmoozing the Fox news elite. Together, they're all part of Washington's 'deep ecology.'
It's like watching the Discovery Channel, but the creature at the bottom of the food chain is -- you.
The Washington press and the "bipartisan" insider machine that rules the country live in a symbiotic relationship. No, scratch that. Actually it's more of a parasite/host role, where the press feeds off what the machine feeds it. In return, it responds within strictly ordered limits to ensure continued access to its food supply.
The power elite, for its part, makes sure that the press is well fed and happy. And both the elites and the press are available to their corporate paymasters whenever they're called upon to provide special services.
It's an efficient little ecosystem - self-contained and humming smoothly, like a watering hole in some sweltering savannah. Politicians come and go like rhinos, while the press hum around them like flies. Occasionally one of the big beasts will sicken and the flies get to feast on him as he slowly ebbs.
Jon Stewart in the cross talk with Stephen Colbert near the end of The Daily Show, congratulated him on his weekend. Colbert responded, "Oh, you must be talking about the weight I lost." Yes, weight lost while running away from the audience at the Correspondents Dinner, suggested Stewart. Colbert, during his show, showed a clip of the audience's nervous, but "respectful" silence after one of his jokes mocking the administration. "This fly isn't eating; he's biting. Ouch. Ouch. We don't like this. Make it go away." It's ok for the courtiers to laugh uninhibitedly at tasteless jokes, like the President's routine of looking under the podium and the table for the missing WMD, but when the big rhino is being mocked, well, the flies can't laugh. It would upset the ecological balance.
It was also interesting that on Stewart's show, his guest was twenty-four year old Matthew Continetti, a conservative movement idealist, who wrote The K-Street Gang which exposes how corrupted Washington has become under the influence of big money lobbyists on the Republican watch. I admire Continetti's idealism, but not his naivete. The very small-government, Libertarian ideals the conservative movement espouses, which have legitimated the privatization and deregulation, are directly responsible for throwing Beltway culture more into the hands of the corrupting influence of the big money that he seeks in his book to expose. He shakes his finger in indignation without seeing cause and effect.
Power in the triumvirate of Sex, Money, and Power is the one element nobody wants to talk about. The Democrats, at least until recently, have been wont to shake their finger at the moral turpitude of the GOP agenda of avarice and economic inequity. And the Republicans in turn shake their finger at the moral turpitude of sexual license promoted by the cultural left and their icon "BJ" Clinton. But nobody seems to want to talk about the the corrupting effects of Power. And nobody wants to talk about how it is being abused. And nobody wants to talk about how it is becoming evermore concentrated in the hands of the power elite in this country, and how, in effect, this is turning us into a Democracy in name only.
Why is it so difficult for us to see this and talk about it. I think it has a lot to do with a feeling of complacency or false security most Americans feel about the soundness of their system. Well it's not sound; it's pretty rickety, and it's very vulnerable.
I'll read his book to be sure, but I suspect that this is what Continetti misses. He wants to point to the good Republicans, the many public-spirited conservatives how have not been corrupted, who really do want small government and not the crony capitalism that the GOP has given us. Well I applaud these principled conservatives as well. But they are impotent. They have let their party to be taken over by the avaricious and the power hungry. Their idealism is toothless, and they can cluck and squawk all they want, but in the end, they as feckless and as culpable as the spineless Democrats in having allowed our democracy to be run into the ground the way these GOP thugs have done.
Update: Billmon has best take on Colbert I've read:
Colbert used satire the way it's used in more openly authoritarian societies: as a political weapon, a device for raising issues that can't be addressed directly. He dragged out all the unmentionables -- the Iraq lies, the secret prisons, the illegal spying, the neutered stupidity of the lapdog press -- and made it pretty clear that he wasn't really laughing at them, much less with them. It may have been comedy, but it also sounded like a bill of indictment, and everybody understood the charges.
If things were going well, if Bush's approval ratings were north of 60%, gas was 80 cents a gallon and the war was being won, I suspect Colbert would have gotten a different reception. His audience could have pretended to be amused -- in that smug, patronizing way we all remember from the neocon glory days. But we're long past the point where the Cheneyites and their journalistic flunkies are willing to suffer such barbs with good humor. The regime's legal and political troubles are too serious, the wounds too open and too deep for the gang to smile while somebody like Colbert gleefully jabs a finger into them.
Colbert's real sin wasn't lese majesty, it was inserting a brief moment of honesty into an event based upon a lie -- one considered socially necessary by the political powers that be, but still, a lie. . . .
The light entertainment at these events is also supposed to reflect the same spirit of forced good cheer, to the point where even matters of deadly seriousness -- things that in other countries might cause governments to fall -- are treated like inside jokes, as with Shrub's looking-for-the-missing-WMDs-under-the-couch routine. Ha ha ha. We're all friends here!
The underlying message, never stated or even acknowledged, is that there are no disputes that can't be resolved within the cozy confines of our "democratic" (oligarchic) system. Friends don't send friends to jail -- or smash their presses or abolish their political parties or line them up against the wall and shoot them.
The problem is that the tissue of this particular lie has been eroding ever since the Clinton impeachment, if not before, and is now worn exceedingly thin. It's becoming harder and harder to conceal the ruthlessness of the struggle for power, or ignore the consequences of losing it.