May 4, 2006

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert was the featured speaker at this year's White House Correspondents' dinner. The White House correspondents are, of course, those journalists we see in the White House briefing room, asking questions of presidential spokesmen and (under this administration) getting few answers. Their dinner guests are the President and many of his staff. The event is an opportunity for the two sides to trade humorous barbs in a sort of mutual roast, but the jokes are usually clawless.

Not this year. Standing six feet away from George W. on the speakers' dais, before a crowd of media luminaries, Colbert (an actor who plays a rabid right-wing journalist on "The Colbert Report") proceeded to rip everybody a new one, with a biting sarcastic wit that was evidently not appreciated by the President or his nominal adversaries in the press - neither side was spared.

Live coverage of this event was carried by C-Span, the station usually devoted to boring wall-to-wall coverage of votes and hearings in the US Congress. I suspect that relatively few people saw the event live on C-Span TV, but C-Span posted it on their website for a day or so, and it quickly made its way onto popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and the torrent networks, where it's been thoroughly enjoyed by millions of ravening liberals like myself.

The mainstream media was slow to pick up the story, preferring to focus their coverage of the dinner on Bush's own act, a comedy routine featuring himself and a Bush impersonator. The denizens of the blogosphere cried foul at the press' failure to mention Colbert, so loudly that their outcry is now the story being covered, finally, by the New York Times et al. (Some of the press claim that they didn't have much to say about Colbert's routine in the first place because they didn't find it funny.)

Whether or not the mainstream media tried deliberately to ignore Colbert, the role of by the Internet has been critical: the event was widely seen because it was distributed online where everybody could judge for themselves, regardless of whether the press chose to cover it. Copyrights be damned - this is important! Somebody finally got through Bush's protective bubble, right in the face of the professional press who have so notably failed to do so. Chalk one up for the forces of online democracy.

Watch the Colbert video here

Corruption

Feb 15, 2004

I went to hear Gary Hart, former US senator and (also former) Democratic presidential candidate, speak in Milan at the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale. His lecture was brief and intelligent, ostensibly about "American Foreign Policy after the election," but in many ways a plug for his good friend John Kerry.

He raised a number of interesting and important points, such as the fact that there has as yet been no real public debate in America on what its role should be in the post-Cold War world. Some scholars and others see the US as already being, or moving into the role of, an empire. Can or should the US be a "benign" empire (if such a thing is possible)? Can a country be both an empire and a republic? (Hart and many others say no.)

Hart says that the values and behaviors of a republic, as America was founded to be, include popular sovereignty and resistance to corruption (corruption in the broad sense of "putting personal interest ahead of the common good"). On both of these counts, America already fails to be a republic: voter turnout is among the world's lowest, so we cannot say that we have "popularly" elected representatives. And no one seems to be putting the common good above personal interest. Hart rightly points to the corruption in political financing: virtually all money for political candidates comes from interest groups. But, in fairness, I can't say that the Democrats score any better on this scale than the Republicans - the Democratic candidates are simply in a different set of pockets and, when it's their turn in power, will make paybacks to a different set of interests.

Had I been registered as a Republican in 2000, I would have voted for John McCain in the primaries, because I liked what he had to say about campaign finance reform. In the event, all I could do was vote for Gore, who is owned by slightly less evil interest groups. I don't like what the teachers' unions have done to American education, but I like even less what Cheney's pals at Halliburton are doing to the world. For the record, I am disgusted enough with Bush & Co. that I have recently joined the Milan chapter of Democrats Abroad, and will be doing my bit by helping out with their website.

However, I have the despairing feeling that it's going to be a long time before either party fields a candidate I can actually respect. If you want to see someone trying to make a real difference in American politics, have a look at John Bonifaz and his organization.

John and I were in India together on our study abroad year in Benares. We didn't like each other then, and have hardly met since, but, through the grapevine, I've been aware of what he's been up to, and have come to respect him greatly - his heart and mind are both in the right place, and he's very, very intelligent in how he pursues his goals. A few years ago he was thinking of running for office in Massachusetts - against John Kerry - and I pledged money to his campaign (for the first time in my political life); unfortunately, he bowed out after 9/11, though he still has a few things to say to Kerry.

John's got a new book out which may interest some of you (others will hate it <grin>): Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush.