Beltway pundits: We are not amused

In my experience, there's no bigger bunch of crybabies in American public life than the fops and courtiers of our Washington press corps. If Comedy Channel satirist Steven Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner did nothing else, it surely proved that.

Two years ago, the same crowd guffawed at a White House video depicting that playful scamp George W. Bush searching the Oval Office for Iraq's missing WMDs.

Yet, they were offended to hear Colbert, doing his dead-on impersonation of an adoring FoxNews pundit, telling Bush "I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

Faking phony sincerity is hard. Yet Colbert remained in character throughout. "I stand for this man," he declared, "because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things, things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world."

By and large, the Beltway celebrities were not amused. The classical term, pardon my French, is lese majeste: the crime of insulting the king. Most empathized with the president, poor baby, sitting with a forced grin being lampooned to his face. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen grumped that "Colbert was more than rude. He was a bully."

After first ignoring the performance -- many news accounts praised the president's mildly amusing routine with a Bush impersonator without mentioning Colbert -- pundits complained that the comic wasn't funny.

Maybe that's because his secondary target was the media swells themselves. After praising FoxNews for giving "both sides of every story: the President's side, and the Vice President's side," he complained about the press's interest in stories like NSA wiretaps and secret prisons in Eastern Europe.

"Let's review the rules," Colbert said. "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. Just put 'em 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!"

Too bitter? It's a matter of taste. Instead of trying to amuse his live audience, Colbert used them as a collective straight man. A TV performer, he pitched his act to the C-Span cameras. (Google has bought the rights; you can watch on your computer and decide.)

Satire comes in many forms. I doubt Swift's "A Modest Proposal" evoked belly laughs among Ireland's 18th-century English occupiers when it recommended ending poverty by roasting peasant infants like suckling pigs.

Orwell's "Animal Farm" had few fans in the Politburo when it mocked communism's pretense of universal brotherhood: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Written in 1943, Orwell's fable found no publisher until World War II ended, making Stalin and Churchill no longer allies.

This president loves dishing it out. The AP reporter who introduced Colbert told an anecdote about Bush teasing him at a press conference for having "a face for radio." Ha ha ha. Good one, Mr. President. He is awfully homely. Colbert's performance, however, made it clear that Bush doesn't enjoy taking it.

Well, tough. Millions of Americans haven't enjoyed being subjected to Bush's swaggeringly contemptuous disregard for the truth. Nor, to come to the point, the posturing of media enablers like Cohen, a liberal columnist who wrote in 2000 that the nation was "in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse ... That man is George W. Bush."

The larger point is that Beltway courtiers like Cohen, Time's Joe Klein and others currently succumbing to the vapors over critical e-mails from fans thrilled by Colbert's gutsy performance, are on their way out.

The brief reign of the celebrity pundit began with cable TV and appears to be ending with the Internet. Washington socialites are quickly being replaced in public esteem by politically oriented bloggers like Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, the inimitable Digby, Glenn Greenwald, Billmon, Atrios and many others. As Greg Sargeant recently pointed out in the American Prospect, "readers are choosing between the words on a screen offered by Klein and other commentators and the words on a screen offered by bloggers on the basis of one thing alone: The quality of the work."

Sure, there's a danger of groupthink. That's true of all mass media. But there's also a fierce independence and intellectual honesty among the best online commentators, which have got Washington courtiers running scared.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.