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surfeit of programming
Monday, April 3 2006
There is a surfeit of programming on the household Tivo in the aftermath of the Guatamela trip, partly because Gretchen (the principle watcher of the teevee) was actually gone for three weeks. I've caught up on all my usual shows, the Novas and Extreme Engineerings, moving on to the lighter stuff such as Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report, the new center of edgy political commentary in the United States. I enjoy the show the most when Colbert is interviewing a right wing blowhard and superficially agreeing with him fervently while simultaneously skewering him over and over again with mockery and hyperbole. I know from experience that it takes a very specially-lobbed rhetorical hand grenade to achieve this effect, and I think Colbert mostly gets it right. I find myself wondering how many right wing fans he has, people who don't get that he's making fun of their views.
Take for example Colbert's "opinion" on Guantanamo, that "If you're in Guantanamo, you're automatically guilty." That's basically the argument our government makes, though they thicken the stew with lies about how Guantanamo prisoners had all been "captured on the battlefield" (only 5% of them actually were). Colbert is the only one in the media rubbing our government's nose in its shockingly extra-judicial reasoning, and he's doing it while claiming to agree with it.
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