I told you it was all a game

Mannion has a good post on the boys and girls in the glass bubble:

They cover politics as if it is a game, as if the people involved, the "players," are players, colorful characters whose quirks and foibles make their stories funnier or more dramatic, but whose political views are no more important than a ballplayer's pet superstitions or diligent pursuit of an arcane record. It's not just Joe Klein. He's the model. That Tom Delay is a thief and a thug and a posed a real threat to the useful functioning of the government never seemed to figure in the coverage of him, even as he disappears back down the sewer out of which he came. The Bug Man, the Hammer, he's just contemporary Washington's Ty Cobb, isn't he?

He also goes on to give the clearest explaination of why, as Media Matters has been documenting, the traditional media have been rolling over like dogs to get their tummy rubbed over Bush's funny skit last Saturday. While ignoring Stephen Colbert's routine, when they're not bashing him for "crossing the line."

And only wishy-washy liberals (like yours truly) seem to remember Bush's funny, funny routine from a year or two ago in which he made jokes about the lies for which he's sent other people's children to their deaths. That wasn't crossing the line, to those who are now complaining about Stephen Colbert.

Why? Because, as Manion sez:

...Bush's "joke" keeps the game going. Colbert's jokes spoiled the fun of pretending it's all a game.

Emphasis mine.

PS: I'm sorry if any of you think I'm overdoing the Colbert posts, but the more I think about it, the more I think this was one of the great moments in American political satire.

ETA and expand on that: Glenn Greenwald found a paragraph I somehow missed from a couple of years back, in which Elisabeth Bumiller, who is supposed to be a reporter for the New York Times, flat-out admitted that she is incapable of doing her job-

I think we were very deferential because … it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.

-and offers another reason why most national "journalists" have been faced with a choice between smearing Colbert and ignoring him:

...they hate Stephen Colbert for doing what they were supposed to do but were so blatantly unwilling and afraid to do, and so they have to smear his act of courage by tossing up their noses and characterizing it as some very offensive breach of etiquette, even depicting his criticissm of the President as being cowardly.

Stephen Colbert did what I don't remember reading about very many political satirists doing: He went into the lions den, and critisized the President of the United States when he was standing three feet from him. Does Garry Trudeau do that? Did Mark Twain?

Does anybody?

Colbert in 2008. It's the only solution.