Fighting Fire with Fire

Stephen Colbert's guest on the 26 Oct episode of The Colbert Report was a septuagenarian author/historian plugging his new book. Here we go again, I thought. Colbert will play his madcap role and the guest will either be flustered or play along. In either case, it's time to switch over to the end of "Seinfeld" on Channel 29.

But it was a "Seinfeld" I'd seen a thousand times, so I switched back to Colbert to discover that once you've hit your 70s, you can abandon political correctness and tell the truth.

Colbert - "Isn't America the most divided it's ever been right now?"

Guest - "Well, there was the Civil War. We divided into two separate countries then and fought each other."

Colbert - "What would your mentor and famed conservative William Buckley make of the Tea Party?"

Guest - "He would say that they are vulgarian."

Colbert - "How do you explain the rise of the Tea Party Movement?"

Guest - "Those political beliefs have always been there. They are prominent now because we have a black man as president."

I gasped when I heard that and so did Stephen Colbert. It is so rare to hear a Liberal making an incendiary statement. When 25% of Americans believe that the president is a closet Muslim and there are billboards along I-70 asking "Where's the birth certificate?", it takes a septuagenarian on a Fake TV News Show to fight fire with fire. Good for him.