February 03, 2012
Steven Colbert v. the Supreme Court
Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:
The line between entertainment and the court blurred even further late last month when Colbert had former Justice John Paul Stevens on his show to discuss his dissent in Citizens United. When a 91-year-old former justice is patiently explaining to a comedian that corporations are not people, it’s clear that everything about the majority opinion has been reduced to a punch line.
Colbert took the mainstream by storm in interview after interview that schooled Americans about the insanity of Citizens United and garnered blowback from NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd, who complained that Colbert is “making a mockery of the system” and questioned whether the real agenda was to “educate the public about the dangers of money and politics ... or simply to marginalize the Republican Party?” Then came the un-ironic defenses of the irony of Colbert and the obligatory navel-gazing about whether Colbert is in fact effecting real change or in peril of succumbing to “irony fatigue.”
At one level, this is all just comedy, and it’s hard to measure whether Colbert’s sustained attacks on the court’s campaign finance decisions are having any real impact, beyond making us laugh. On the other hand, when the New York Times declares that Colbert’s project is deadly serious, and it’s just the rest of politics that’s preposterous, something more than just theater is happening.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:55 PM | Permalink
Comments
I think we need more comedians and fewer clowns in congress.
Posted by: The Phytophactor | Feb 3, 2012 2:22:44 PM
Colbert is a genius and has cojones of steel! After his brave White House Correspondents Dinner performance he became a living national treasure. The civics lesson that he is now providing on the absurd Citizens United ruling is priceless. The clueless SCOTUS has no idea how low its standing is today. And the R-A-T-S are a bunch of morons who deserve to be lampooned even more harshly than Colbert's too-gentle mockery of them.
Posted by: Sam | Feb 4, 2012 12:43:14 AM
Agree. And the Junior Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, also turns out to be a pretty good lawmaker.
In a nutshell "...Citizens United “epitomizes the problem of having a court where no justice has ever run for any office, including dogcatcher.”
Of course that’s precisely the problem: The institutional aloofness that allowed the Roberts court to pen such a politically naive decision is the same blind spot that precludes them from even understanding, much less responding to, the media criticism.
I just came across this great Colbert quote:
"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.”
Thank goodness it's an election year. Perhaps enough citizens will be force-fed enough "truthiness" over the next few months they will demand that their representatives do something to help them stop vomiting.
Posted by: John Ballard | Feb 5, 2012 6:32:45 AM
Post a comment