Fighting the War on Error

"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists."
- Political & Social Activist Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989)

Friday, May 30, 2008

Colbert hits a trifecta


Is there any wonder why Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report won a Peabody Award? This latest clip is one of his wittier ones in recent memory, as he hates on the Myanmar junta, Michelle Malkin and Scott McClellan. That's quite a trifecta.

As angry as I get over Malkin and McClellan, Colbert brings me (and millions of others, presumably) back down to Earth with just the right amount of sarcastic humor.

By the way, I'll have much more about McClellan later tonight - the press has been in a feeding frenzy, and the way he's hitting the talk show circuit, you'd think he was shamelessly plugging a book full of ideas that he should have said years ago when he was really in a position to make a difference.

Oops.

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Sunday, April 06, 2008

The Colbert Report cops a Peabody Award


Congrats to Stephen Colbert and all who work on his show, The Colbert Report, for winning the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. The award is well deserved, and just in case you don't think he deserves any kudos, it's okay by him - Colbert's inclined to give himself all the praise he deserves. *Smirk* My suggestion? He should send footage of this over to Bill O'Reilly and have some fun with it - maybe using the award as a doorstop, or something like that.

Just in case you were actually starting to believe that Bill O'Lielly is really Bill O'Reilly, it never gets old bringing up his biggest whopper ever told - a blatant lie that his old tabloid show, Inside Edition, won two Peabody Awards.

Man did I get a big laugh recalling how Franken made O'Reilly look like the gigantic ass he truly is. Cooks and Liars has the rest:
Many C&L readers remember the halcyon days when the worst lie Bill O’Reilly ever told was that his old show Inside Edition had won a Peabody Award, the oldest and most prestigious award given to electronic media. You may recall Al Franken also having lots of fun debunking that lie. Now it turns out that The Colbert Report, which "some people say" (ha) is a thinly veiled parody of The O’Reilly Factor, has actually won a Peabody award. Let's hope Mr. O'Reilly sends Mr. Colbert a congratulatory fruit basket.

Update: Okay, comment number 24 is good enough to bring up from below:

Colbert should run around saying he won a Polk, forcing people to remind him it was actually a Peabody.
Brilliant, just brilliant - especially the reader's comment. A little background - Bill O'Reilly smugly began telling people a few years ago that his old show, Inside Edition, won two Peabody Awards. "What do you want us to do, give 'em back?" he snidely remarked when once asked a question about IE being a tabloid show. Upon hearing this, Franken got curious, made a few calls, and discovered that O'Reilly's show hadn't so much as sniffed one Peabody, much less two. And the comment from the C&L story above about a Polk? That was what O'Reilly tried to cover his arse with - that his show won "two [George] Polk awards, not two Peabodys." Turns out, that was a lie, too; Inside Edition won a George Polk award, but after O'Reilly left. Oops.

Oh, why not? Here's some footage of the exchange Franken and O'Reilly had a few years ago at the Los Angeles Book Expo to promote their respective books. It's pretty good - watch as BOR comes unglued. Evidently, Billy no likey getting exposed as a liar. I promise it's worth it - it's under a minute...


Good stuff, eh? This is precisely why O'Reilly derides people like Franken and Websites like Media Matters - because they are able to successfully call him out on his lies. No wonder BOR hates the Internet. (Full disclosure - Franken is the first I read calling BOR "O'Lielly," so I'm carrying the torch, since Franken is trying to make a difference by running for the U.S. Senate in his home state of Minnesota. I hope he wins, but if he doesn't, maybe Franken will go back to writing his brilliant books that sagely debunk the right-wing noise machine, led by none other than O'Lielly himself.)

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