Monthly Archives: April 2006

Stephen Colbert's speech last night was at least as critical of the Washington press corps as it was of George W. Bush. Take this section…

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years, you people were so good over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know…fiction.

This was a dinner for White House correspondents, let's remember. And if you were trying to tell them that you think they're a bunch of incompetents who have damaged the world by not doing their jobs, I'm not sure what you could have written that would convey that charge better than the above.

The more I think about it, the more I think Colbert made a conscious decision not to care if the audience laughed. I mean, if all you care about is making White House reporters guffaw, you do jokes about the cramped offices, the hate mail, the lack of respect they get from others, etc. Whatever you think of the guy, he didn't come out there and pander to the audience for laughs. He insulted the audience. Perhaps he totally misjudged the room but I think it's more likely he just plain said what he thought of them.

Here's a safer link to a video of the speech last night…

• Stephen Colbert, Part One
• Stephen Colbert, Part Two
• Stephen Colbert, Part Three

I've received about forty messages from readers of this site about how they felt, ranging the gamut from "he was hilarious" to "not one giggle." I think both extremes overstate and I'm inclined to agree with this e-mail that came from a Rob Rose…

I think my feelings can be summed up quickly:

1. He had some pretty brilliant lines — some of which were perhaps a bit too pointed for that room.

2. Probably not quite how I would have approached it myself — while I personally loathe the Bush administration, if I were working the stage while the President was sitting there, I would probably not want to kick him while he's down quite as much as Colbert did.

3. On the other hand, it was I think pretty true to Colbert's usual style — which means the blame really lies with whoever decided to hire him. They got what they ought to have expected, I think.

There are times when I see some politician I don't like getting slammed and I feel sorry for them. In spite of what anyone says, these are human beings and even the ones I think are destructive are in some warped way trying to make life better. But then I think about that destruction and about the fact that often, they don't seem to recognize it. I often recall a remark I heard on some political discussion show years ago about one elected official. Some reporter said, "He does not connect what he does with its impact on people's lives. If you tell him someone died because they couldn't afford medical care, he says 'That's terrible' and genuinely feels sorry for them…but refuses to accept that it might have something to do with that bill he signed that cost a million people their health insurance." Even the politicos I support at times do things that devastate lives and our sympathies ought to go to the folks who get killed in wars, lose their homes, etc., not to the ones who, even inadvertently or indirectly, caused or failed to stop that damage.

I also remember that most politicians seem to be fine with calling their opponents mentally ill or criminal or pathological liars, and that they voluntarily get into a line of work where others are going to do that to them. Nixon used to use the old ruse of saying, "What people say about me doesn't bother me but it upsets my family" — to which a reasonable reply was, "Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you decided to seek public office." It sort of comes with the job description.

The man who booked Colbert for the event — apparently the gent you see on the video introducing him — did what they always do: He went for the highest-profile topical comedian he could get. That was probably Stephen Colbert. I'm not sure why they even have a comedian at these things since the audience never seems all that interested in sitting there, listening to an outsider mock them and what they do. But you're right: They got what they should have expected. And everyone Colbert insulted, Bush especially, should have thick-enough skin to endure it.

In the previous message, I posted the following two links to the best copy of Stephen Colbert's routine I could find online. This upset a couple of readers of newsfromme because — as I hadn't noticed, sorry — the links are to a site that also hosts a fair amount of porn. At the moment, I can't find another complete link to a decent copy so for those of you who want to risk connecting with a site that also contains naked people, here they are: Part One and Part Two. If and when I find a "safer" link, I'll post it.

My e-mailbox is stuffed with messages from people telling me either that Colbert was inarguably hilarious or definitely unfunny. Most of these people seem to think he is always whichever way they found him to be at the Correspondents' Dinner.

I haven't quite decided what I think of Stephen Colbert's speech at the Correspondents' Dinner though I'm getting there. I will say that he showed great courage to do some of that material in front of that crowd. I'd be curious to hear reports from people who were actually in the room since the audience was not well-miked and I'm not sure why certain folks were selected for the audience reaction shots. One did get the idea that Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush weren't delighted with the floor show…as is explained in what I suspect is the first of many articles about the performance.

I've never been to one of these press dinners but I'm guessing it's a very hard room for a comedian. The people aren't there to be entertained. They want to mingle and hobnob with the famous. They'll sit still for a speech by the president, whoever he is at the moment, because it's his presence that elevates the importance of the event they're proud to be attending. But apart from that, I'll bet most of the crowd is eager for it to be over with so they can go back to fraternizing. The gent who was hosting seemed to be having a fair amount of trouble getting the audience to pipe down and listen to the program.

I'd also be curious to know what Colbert's goal was…and it may not have just been to entertain the folks out front in the formal wear. If it was, he probably went about it the wrong way. When you hammer the president that much right in front of him, you make an awful lot of people uncomfy…and not just the ones who side with the guy. I thought some of Colbert's lines were brilliant but if I'd been in the room, I might have spent more time looking at the reactions of others (Bush, especially) to some of them than laughing. On the other hand, Colbert's main objective may have been to cultivate a certain image as a performer…or simply to express his views. He could well have succeeded in one or both of those.

I'm going to watch it again tomorrow and see how I feel about it then. It may be it's like one of those events where the boss is being ridiculed but everyone feels okay about laughing as soon as the boss starts laughing. Only in this case, the boss never started laughing.

Yesterday, I told you I liked Penn and Teller. Today, I tell you I like David Copperfield…at to some extent for the same reasons. Both acts took magic to new places. While I have a great respect for someone who can do the linking rings as well as Jonathan Pendragon or the cups-and-balls as well as Johnny "Ace" Palmer, I also like guys who come out on stage and do something you've never seen before. Or at least, it doesn't look like anything you've ever seen before. (A lot of good "new" magic is putting a new facade on an old structure.)

I know people mock Copperfield's poses and the way he portrays himself…and I find that kind of thing funny and/or creepy when it's done by lesser magicians who haven't his skill or credibility. But there's also a "perfectionist" aspect to his work that I admire and a constant desire to do something different, something that the audience (the members of it not on his payroll) will long remember. Someone posted to Google Video a bit from one of his specials that I heard people discussing in the Ralphs Market, days after it first aired on CBS. It's another one of those tricks that you can figure out if you have the slightest common sense but he does it so well that it works anyway. Here it is…

Well, it looks like Don Imus no longer has the trophy for the most uncomfortable speech at one of these events.

If you just want to catch whatever Stephen Colbert does at the Correspondents' Dinner tonight, C-Span is currently saying that the post-meal program will commence around 9:30 PM (all times Eastern), George W. Bush will speak at 10:05 and the Prince of Truthiness will go on around 10:25. Right after the dinner is concluded, C-Span will re-air the entire thing and they're saying that will start "around Midnight," plus they'll run it all again on Sunday at 12:30, which I assume means 12:30 PM.

That's what they're currently saying on-air. The schedule on the CNN website says something else. This is not unusual for C-Span.

Also, I believe Mr. Colbert is the subject of a story tomorrow night on 60 Minutes.

Here's a birthday shout-out to Lennie Weinrib, one of my favorite friends and one of the most talented. I first worked with Lennie on a show for Sid and Marty Krofft for which he was re-creating the role of H.R. Pufnstuf. Lennie was not only the voice of Pufnstuf but wrote most of that character's first TV series. There was a time there when you couldn't turn on your TV or radio without hearing Lennie: He had hundreds of commercials running and he was on a dozen cartoon shows (including The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, written about here a few days ago).

This period followed the one where you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing Lennie doing a guest role on some TV series. One time a few years ago, I was flipping channels on my satellite dish and I caught him simultaneously on reruns of The Munsters and Emergency, plus some channel was running The Thrill of It All, a Doris Day movie in which he had a small role. The still above is from one of his several appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. And at some point in there, he also had a period as a film director. Anyone here ever see Beach Ball? Or Wild, Wild Winter?

He's pretty much retired now and living outside the U.S. but we still talk and e-mail, and in honor of his birthday, I'm actually packing up a box of stuff I've been promising to send him for several months now. In fact, I like him so much, I'm even going to go mail it.

Tonight, CNN is rerunning a Larry King Live from last Tuesday on which King interviewed Mark Felt, the gent who was recently revealed to have been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's infamous source, "Deep Throat." The interview was pre-taped (i.e., not aired live) at Felt's home and it comprised part of the show. The rest of the hour was a live panel discussion with Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and members of Felt's family.

The panel discussion is of little interest due mainly to King's lazy interviewing style. At one point, he asked, referring to Felt, "What manner of man is this?" Which might have been an interesting question if he'd directed to Woodward, who had the friendship with Felt and who met him in that parking garage many times and who visited him recently. But King put it to Bernstein, who never met Felt and who speculates with as much authority as you or I might have had. Then King asked Ben Bradlee if he ever had any doubts about Felt's validity and he lets Bradlee get away with talking about how perfectly accurate Felt was as a source. The moment cried out for an interviewer who would cite some of the questionable "facts" Deep Throat is quoted as providing in All the President's Men…but King obviously didn't know about them.

By contrast, in the interview with Felt, King asked most of the right questions, perhaps because he was reading them (in some cases, as if he'd never seen them before) from notes prepared by someone else. The discussion, which looks like it was heavily edited, is actually a pretty decent chat with Felt, who's a lot more lucid than one might expect from some recent accounts. It also may be the only one we're ever going to get so if the story of Deep Throat and Watergate interests you, you might want to catch the replay tonight. Felt praises J. Edgar Hoover and even Richard Nixon…and while I got the feeling that some of his answers were learned for the interview (the whole show is about promoting a new book), what emerges is a somewhat different set of motives than we might have expected. Felt has bad words for no one, which you have to suspect was not his attitude back when he was helping Woodward. He seems to have had a powerful devotion to the law, which more than any goals involving politics or personal benefit may have been his dominant reason for doing what he did.

In the panel discussion, Carl Bernstein couldn't resist making a couple of comments about how he wished more public servants today were like Mark Felt, placing duty to the truth above duty to the boss. A lot of us feel that way.

I don't know quite why this struck me as funny but when I went to tell my TiVo to record the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner tonight, I laughed to see the listing: "President George W. Bush and Stephen Colbert speak." And I had a mental flash of Colbert looking at this and saying, "Hmm…have to do something about the billing order."

I'm a big fan of Penn and Teller…not of everything they do, of course. I think, for example, they're responsible for what I see as an unfortunate belief among some newer magicians. That's the notion that a trick is hip if you can only work some self-mutilation and stage blood into it. But that's okay. One of the things I like about them is that they try different things and aren't afraid to alienate one segment of the audience to entertain another.

For a time, they had a bad name among magicians for allegedly exposing tricks. I thought that was an unfair rap. The few tricks they did expose were the kind that anyone with an I.Q. higher than their shoe size could figure out in ten seconds. The one exposed in today's video link is just such a trick. I figured out how it was done when I was six. I mean, how else could you put a box containing a live human head on the floor unless the rest of the human was under the floor? There would be little entertainment value in doing the trick and pretending it was fooling anyone. There's plenty in doing it in a way that shows you how hard it is to do.

The clip is from a pretty good TV special they did in 1990 called Don't Try This At Home and it runs a little more than three minutes. So let's blast off…

Rush Limbaugh, as you've probably heard, has reached a pretty favorable plea bargain (his lawyer calls it an "agreement") regarding prescription abuses relating to his drug dependency. He is paying a $30,000 fine (his lawyer calls it a payment to defray the public cost of the investigation) which represents something like two hours' income for the radio host.

The initial news reports said "Rush Limbaugh arrested" and his supporters are scurrying to claim that since he turned himself in, the word "arrested" is inaccurate. Not only is it inaccurate, they say, but the use of it is an example of Liberal media bias.

I don't think I buy either spin. The word is probably technically correct. If there's a warrant out for you and you go in and you're booked and they take a mug shot photo of you, you've been arrested, albeit voluntarily. But the word is also misleading. The first thing people think of it you say someone's been arrested is that the cops came and put the cuffs on him, which is not what happened here.

It isn't bias. It's just the way reporters write stories. A few moments ago, I did a Google search on the words "surrendered to police" and one of the first things I found was this item about an NFL player who's out there setting a wonderful example for today's youth…

Green Bay Packers fullback Najeh Davenport was arrested Monday, accused of breaking into a university dormitory and defecating in a woman's closet. Davenport, 23, surrendered to police Monday and was charged with a second-degree felony count of burglary and a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief, said Richard Master, a Miami Shores police spokesman. The former University of Miami player was wanted on a warrant issued in April.

There was a warrant for the guy and he turned himself in…and they used the word "arrested." I think it's a bad choice of word but it's pretty standard for this kind of story. It wasn't used just to make Limbaugh look bad.

And what do you want to bet that if it had been a Democrat or Liberal in exactly the same situation, Rush would be out there proclaiming that a dangerous, immoral criminal had been arrested…and then a bleeding-heart, weak-kneed prosecutor had given him a slap on the wrist instead of throwing the slime in prison where he belongs? I'm not saying that would have been the proper punishment for Limbaugh. But you know that's what he would have said.

Veteran TV-movie writer Harvey Bullock died last Sunday at the age of 84. Bullock was an amazingly prolific author of scripts, usually in partnership with R.S. Allen, whom he met while writing a radio show starring Abe Burrows in 1949. The team of Allen and Bullock went on to become one of the top teams in television writing with credits on The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, I-Spy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Bill Dana Show, The Joey Bishop Show, Rango, Hogan's Heroes, Gomer Pyle, Mr. Terrific, My World and Welcome To It, Love American Style, The Doris Day Show, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, Alice and dozens of others. They also wrote numerous scripts for animation including The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home. (Bullock and Allen created and produced the last of these.) This is a very partial list, and I should emphasize that Bullock and Allen wrote some of the most memorable episodes of the TV shows listed. For instance, they did 31 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, including the one about the goat that ate dynamite, the one where Barney Fife had to track down a cow thief, and the one about Aunt Bea entering a pickle-making contest.

In the world of motion pictures, they wrote Honeymoon Hotel, Girl Happy (starring Elvis Presley), A Man Called Flintstone, With Six You Get Eggroll, Don't Drink the Water and one of my favorite unheralded comedies, Who's Minding the Mint?

Bullock's career slowed in 1981 when his partner Ray Allen passed away…though Harvey did team up in '86 with Everett Greenbaum (whose partner Jim Fritzell had died in '79) and together they wrote the highly-rated TV-Movie, Return to Mayberry, which reunited the characters from The Andy Griffith Show.

Harvey's work will live on and so will his name. In 1974, a police lieutenant character was added to the Batman comic books and he soon became a permanent part of that character's mythology. His name is Harvey Bullock and I don't know quite how it happened but he was apparently named after the writer. I'm told he felt honored.

The annual White House Correspondents Dinner is tomorrow night. I always find this interesting because of the tradition of bringing in some comedian — usually someone who does topical humor — to entertain, right in front of the current president and a goodly portion of the Washington establishment. Last year, they had Cedric the Entertainer but the highlight was a speech by Laura Bush. This year, Stephen Colbert will be toplining and I have a feeling he's going to be quite wonderful.

The event airs on C-Span, which will probably repeat it a couple of times over the weekend. You'll have to keep an eye on the ever-changing C-Span schedule to know when but at the moment, they're planning to run a 90 minute live preview at 8 PM Eastern time and the dinner itself at 9:30. Don't believe the part where they say it'll only run an hour.

Here are two articles about why the price of gas is so high, one by Charles Krauthammer and one by Michael Kinsley. Krauthammer says it's all a matter of supply and demand, completely overlooking the question of whether the oil companies are manipulating the supply, or taking advantage of shortages to crank prices up more than necessary. Kinsley says it's all because of the Iraq War and that we should tax windfall profits to help pay for that war. That makes more sense to me but it'll never happen. It won't even be seriously considered.