Richard Cohen Explains It All

By Ezra

Blasting Colbert for being both unfunny and rude, Cohen, before collapsing from a fit of the vapors, writes:

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country.

Maybe if our country's prominent political columnists, like Richard Cohen, were doing a better job, the American people wouldn't need Colbert's apparently poor imitations of courage and wit. As it is, Cohen is occasionally courageous, as when he admitted he didn't know algebra, and often funny, as when he preened over his ignorance of algebra, but he possesses neither quality in such abundance that Colbert's performance was unnecessary.

I don't know. Maybe Colbert wasn't funny. I didn't find him a laugh riot, to be honest. His punches seemed aimed at the kidney, not the funny bone. And if a panel of eminent comedians sees fit to sanction him for it, so be it. But Cohen's attack on Colbert's humor is only a side dish. The main course is revenge, normally a dish served cold, but at chez Cohen, it's garnished with bitchy. "Colbert," writes Cohen, "was not just a failure as a comedian but rude." Heavens to Betsy no! Not...rude!

Worse than being rude, Colbert was substantive. He "took a swipe at Bush's Iraq policy, at domestic eavesdropping, and he took a shot at the news corps for purportedly being nothing more than stenographers recording what the Bush White House said." In other words, he urinated on Richard Cohen's fire hydrant, and Cohen's not happy about it. Not just anyone, after all, can do substance. Let the jester jest and the blogger blog, but leave the heavy lifting to credentialed columnists. Colbert was out of line, an overhyped funnyman who darkened a light roast by disrupting the night's comity. "Bush," Cohen laments, "[had] to sit there and pretend to laugh at Colbert's lame and insulting jokes." Being president is hard work! I bet the chicken was rubbery, too, but Bush had to eat it in order to be polite. The man's a hero.

Colbert, on the other hand, is an embarrassment. He doesn't get that substantive criticisms of the president should only appear in easily ignored venues. The job of the pundit is not to speak truth to power for power's sake, but to speak about power to the public for appearance's sake. That's how we know we've a healthy democracy, when journalists with wide access and great sources can leak press releases to the public fully hours before the administration would've sent them out. If journalists were to start screaming at power, convincing power that there was no friendship, or at least affection, underlying the relationship, the gig would be up. And Colbert came dangerously close to doing exactly that.

He was speaking, after all, on behalf of the White House Correspondent's Association. He was their monkey, and so it was ultimately their fault that he was present to fling poo at the honoree. This dinner is about one thing: reifying that the press corps can separate the personal from the political. At the end of the day, everyone's in the same club. They are, if not friends, then colleagues. But Colbert spoiled that, and he spoiled it for Cohen, too. He signaled that there's a whole mass of people out there for whom politics doesn't stop at five o'clock, who think the president's actions are not confined to anyone's dayjob. Colbert represented them, and Cohen knows that he doesn't. And notice this: Cohen never attacked Colbert for getting it wrong, for missing the issues, for spinning the facts. He attacked Colbert's worth as a comedian, but he never broached his values as a commentator. Respect Cohen for his realism: that's one hydrant he's never getting back.