Accidental Blogger

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  • Lunar Outsourcing

    In the fast developing friendly atmosphere of co-operation between the world’s oldest and largest democracies, as the US and India like to call themseves, a new collaborative frontier has opened up. According to an agreement signed between NASA and the Indian Space Agency, the Indian unmanned mission to the moon in 2008 will include carrying US lunar mapping instruments. The mutually beneficial deal will cut cost for the US in trasporting scientific payload to outerspace and the Indian endeavor will gain from the technical and strategic input from NASA.

    "American outsourcing to India is approaching a new frontier: outer space.

    Indian and U.S. space agencies signed an agreement Tuesday in India’s high-tech hub of Bangalore to fly two American lunar mapping instruments on India’s unmanned mission to orbit the moon, scheduled for 2008.

    Since sending a U.S. spacecraft to the moon again remains a possibility only in the distant future, NASA is taking advantage of India’s more immediate, lower-cost plans for space exploration.

    The joint space venture also is part of the Bush administration’s effort to forge a close strategic partnership with India, which includes a proposed deal on civilian nuclear cooperation that is awaiting approval by Congress."

  • The 12th Carnival of The Liberals

    The 12th Carnival of the Liberals is under way at Daylight Atheism.  World views of ten progressive bloggers are featured. Many of them explain why religious fundamentalism and bigotry are roadblocks to progress on issues ranging from politics, immigration, science education, personal responsibility and freedom. Accidental Blogger is pleased to be included on this list. Please visit the Carnival and explore all the thought provoking pieces. Thanks to Ebonmuse for organizing the event.

  • Democrats Too Angry To Win? So Fear The MSD & The MSM

    It is terribly dispiriting to see mainstream Democrats (MSD) run for cover every time someone has the courage to stand up to Republican bullying. Democratic insiders hounded out Howard Dean during the 2004 presidential primaries because he appeared too "angry." Angry? To me he sounded like a person who was telling it like it was – a refreshing change from the mealy mouthed rhetoric of the other contenders. In the ensuing year and a half, everything Dean had said about the war, the economy and the corruption of the Bush administration has been proven true.  Now that another election is looming on the horizon, the MSD and their spokespersons in the mainstream media (MSM) are once again getting queasy about truth telling. 

    We are by now all aware of the deliberate obliteration of Stephen Colbert from the news by the MSM. A few years ago, with the MSM’s virtual lock on news coverage, it would have been an effective attempt at censoring. But thanks to bloggers, the "truthiness" was out instantly and the media biggies were caught red faced and flat footed.  Except for Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, no other major news anchor has had the grace to admit that Colbert was ignored and that bloggers are now forcing the hand of the MSM on what gets covered as news. 

    Richard Cohen of The Washington Post has addressed the Colbert matter twice – the first time when he took Colbert to task for not being funny and the second time when he responded to irate Colbert fans on the Democratic left. Both times Mr. Cohen was wrong.

    In slamming Colbert and the blogosphere in the same breath, Cohen said:

    "Stephen Colbert was not funny at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. All the rest is commentary.

    The commentary, though, is also what I do, and it will make the point that Colbert was not just a failure as a comedian but rude. Rude is not the same as brash. It is not the same as brassy. It is not the same as gutsy or thinking outside the box. Rudeness means taking advantage of the other person’s sense of decorum or tradition or civility that keeps that other person from striking back or, worse, rising in a huff and leaving. The other night, that person was George W. Bush.

    On television, Colbert is often funny. But on his own show he appeals to a self-selected audience that reminds him often of his greatness. In Washington he was playing to a different crowd, and he failed dismally in the funny person’s most solemn obligation: to use absurdity or contrast or hyperbole to elucidate — to make people see things a little bit differently. He had a chance to tell the president and much of important (and self-important) Washington things it would have been good for them to hear. But he was, like much of the blogosphere itself, telling like-minded people what they already know and alienating all the others. In this sense, he was a man for our times.

    He also wasn’t funny."

    I’ll say to Mr. Cohen that Colbert did exactly that. He told the president and "self important" Washington what was good for them to hear not just what they felt good about hearing.  Cohen’s put down of Colbert enraged the left blogosphere and he heard in no uncertain terms from bloggers whom he calls the Digital Lynch Mob for their fury.

    "I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner. Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 — a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley ("You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face") and ended with Ron ("Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER") who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you’re a genius

    It seemed that most of my correspondents had been egged on to write me by various blogs. In response, they smartly assembled into a digital lynch mob and went roaring after me. If I did not like Colbert, I must like Bush. If I write for The Post, I must be a mainstream media warmonger. If I was over a certain age — which I am — I am simply out of it, wherever "it" may be. All in all, I was — I am, and I guess I remain — the worthy object of ignorant, false and downright idiotic vituperation.

    But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble — not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before — back in the Vietnam War era. That’s when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

    The hatred is back.  I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America — the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have. Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that’s going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice — once because they couldn’t stop it and once more at the polls."

    Yes, spewing uncontrolled rage and raw hatred at a person you don’t know, is an uncivil and unnerving thing – and it is far too easy to do so sitting at the keyboard in your own home, in pajamas. I too am disturbed sometimes by the incivility that passes for discourse on the blogosphere. But fact based anger and frustration at an administration that has repeatedly insulted, deceived and corrupted our public institutions is legitimate, both on the part of Stephen Colbert and the aggrieved Democratic bloggers.  Mr. Cohen ought to understand that these angry words and emotions were not perhaps wholly directed towards him as an individual. He in this case, was just the voice and the face of the powerful but lazy MSM who failed in their job as watchdogs and the ineffectual MSD who were busy cowering before the hectoring trio of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld. The very same groups that the angry bloggers feel have let them down twice – once by not boldly challenging the Bush administration when it took us down a disastrous path in Iraq and once more when they lost at the polls by not being sufficiently angry about it.

  • The Maternal Instinct – Not Exactly What You Thought

    Read this for a clear perspective before you go out and buy cute animal cards for Mother’s Day.Motherhood_3 (Image from National Geographic photo galleries: Animal Mothers and Babies)

    Oh, mothers! Dear noble, selfless, tender and ferocious defenders of progeny all across nature’s phylogeny: How well you deserve our admiration as Mother’s Day draws near, and how photogenically you grace the greeting cards that we thrifty offspring will send in lieu of a proper gift.

    Here is a mother guinea hen, trailed by a dozen cotton-ball chicks. Here a mother panda and a baby panda share a stalk of bamboo, while over there, a great black eagle dam carries food to her waiting young. We love you, Mom, you’re our port in the storm. You alone help clip Mother Nature’s bloodstained claws.

    But wait. That guinea hen is walking awfully fast. In fact, her brood cannot quite keep up with her, and by the end of the day, whoops, only two chicks still straggle behind. And the mama panda, did she not give birth to twins? So why did just one little panda emerge from her den? As for the African black eagle, her nest is less a Hallmark poem than an Edgar Allan Poe. The mother has gathered prey in abundance, and has hyrax carcasses to spare. Yet she feeds only one of her two eaglets, then stands by looking bored as the fattened bird repeatedly pecks its starving sibling to death.

    What is wrong with these coldhearted mothers, to give life then carelessly toss it away? Are they freaks or diseased or unnatural? Cackling mad like Piper Laurie in "Carrie"?

    In a word — ha. As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be, to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young’s blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings.

    Rest of the informative article here from The New York Times.

  • Fear Of Flying And Remorse Free Slaughter

    Came across this extraordinary, prescient piece written by Rabindranath Tagore – Asia’s first Nobel laureate.  Tagore’s observations came during his travels through the middle east in the 1930’s when he witnessed the bombing of an Iraqi village by British imperial forces. Tagore’s insightful humanity and intimate knowledge of imperialism ( which enables men to view fellow men as so many disposable objects), led him to lament the efficiency of remote aerial killings which afford warriors a calm, mechanical detachment – not a luxury in face to face combat. Also note the other political, religious and sociological "airplanes" of our minds that Tagore refers to which make man’s inhumanity to man possible – for they too lift us up to the remote heights of cold classification of the world into "us vs them" and away from our shared humanity.

    (Makes one wish that Laura had read Tagore to George W. Bush at bed time.)

    Translated from Bengali by Debjani Sengupta, the piece originally appeared in the Indian journal Sarai.  Thanks to Amardeep Singh for linking to it in his own outstanding post about Bengali science fiction and children’s literature.

    Update: See more on the illusions and delusions we indulge in when it comes to a self righteous, unjust war at Leiter Reports.

    Airborne (from In Persia)

    As the aircraft began to climb, the intimacy between the world and our five senses grew faint, till it narrowed to only one – our sight – but it was too hazy for comfort. All evidence of this certain yet diverse earth we absorb daily, now faded; a three-dimensional reality became a two-dimensional picture. Creativity is manifest in varied structures seen in the totality of space and time. As these distinctions become obscure, creation turns out to be annihilation. Just then, our earth appeared to me in that light of extinction. Her identity vanished, her constant demands on the imagination ceased. In a similar state, when a man sets out to drop fiery weapons from an aeroplane, he becomes unspeakably ruthless. His cruel arm does not hesitate in doubt. He is absolutely certain of his enemy’s guilt – for they are so remote from him.

    Men have an innate tenderness for the natural world. When the reality of this world becomes unreal, his affection withers. The advice given in the Gita is comparable to this airplane – it removed Arjuna’s compassionate mind to a distant world; from its pinnacle it became impossible to perceive who lived and who died. Men have many such theoretical aeroplanes to conceal reality in their armoury – in imperialism, in theories of sociology, in religions. The blows that fall from those heights come pleasantly  wrapped with one consolation: Na hanyatey, hanyamanye sharirey (The body can be slain but the the soul is indestructible). (1)

    The British maintain an airbase in Baghdad. The resident Christian priest told me they were currently bombing a village of a Sheikh. The dead, old and young alike, were receiving these blows from the misty heights of the British Empire. It was easy to kill them – imperialism made their humanity indistinct. Christ had acknowledged these men too as children of his Father, but to the padre, Christ, his children were unreal. It was impossible to recognize them from the soaring aircraft of Imperialism, so all over the Empire today Christ received fatal wounds. Moreover, from an aeroplane it was easy to bomb the desert dwellers. There was no fear of retaliation; and the dead and injured appeared as mere statistics. People who can be killed thoughtlessly have never been alive in the minds of their killers. This is the reason why men and women ignorant of Western ways of destruction are slowly becoming a blur to these masters of war. (2)

    Translated by Debjani Sengupta.
    NOTES
    1. A quote from The Bhagvadgita (Chapter 2, verse 20) when Krishna advises Arjuna to participate in war, fighting against kin and family.
    2. Tagore visited Iran in April 1932, when he was seventy, at the invitation of the Shah. It was his second airplane journey and the longest. This essay, ?Parosshey?, records his thoughts on that long flight as well as his myriad impressions of the stopovers, and his final destination.

  • Pain Preferable To Dread For Some

    Many of us find waiting in the doctor’s office for a surgical procedure more stressful than the procedure itself. Most of us prefer to remove a band-aid with a quick yank rather than a slow pull.  Sometimes the human brain dislikes waiting for an unfavorable outcome more than it does the outcome itself. The cost of waiting is dread. The extreme dreaders are those who concentrate on the outcome more. (Which is also why some of us look away when being given a shot or poked by a needle for blood draw.) Dread is the result of what our brain sees as "the disutility" of waiting for an unavoidable and unfavorable outcome. Hence given the choice of waiting and the outcome, many among us just prefer to "get it over with."

    "Deciding between two choices can be difficult, particularly when they are separated in time. Economic theory accommodates the calculation by discounting the future outcome by the amount of time, most simply via a hyperbolic function. An additional factor is the cost of waiting, which can be represented clearly when the outcomes are unpleasant (electric shocks to one’s foot), and the choice is between a stronger shock in a few seconds versus a weaker shock a half minute later. Many people will opt to "get it over with," primarily, one assumes, to avoid the anticipation of future pain, which is used as an operational definition by Berns et al. in examining the neural basis of dread."

    …..  "First, they put volunteers into a brain scanner and gave them something to dread: an electric shock to their feet. In the first part of the experiment, the 32 subjects were informed when the shock was coming and how big it would be. In the second part, they could choose between a big shock with a short time delay, or a smaller shock that they had to wait longer to experience.

    Nine subjects went for more pain right away to avoid the agony of waiting. The functional magnetic resonance imaging showed heightened activity in the area of the brain responsible for perceiving pain, specifically in the region that pays attention to stimuli. In other words, these extreme dreaders focused so much on the impending shock that the wait was as unpleasant as the shock itself, Berns explains. Twenty-three were willing to wait longer for a smaller shock, and the same part of their brains showed no spike in activity. The team publishes their results in the 5 May Science.a"

    The full news article about decision and dread here.

  • Bumbling Macho Men – Theirs and Ours

    Much is being made of the fact that the fearsome Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has terrorized Iraqis and Americans alike with his brutal jihadist tactics during the Iraqi insurgency, is inept with a machine gun. Zarqawi’s own videos, broadcast in the Arab world for recruiting purposes present him as an intrepid warrior and a crack shot. But recent videos released by the US military show Zarqawi behaving more like a klutzy bumpkin than a sophisticated representative of Al Qaida, who has been menacing Mesopotamia. To add insult to this injurious image, Zarqawi is seen wearing white American made tennis shoes under his all black guerilla outfit. (I didn’t know that a poor fashion sense necessarily makes anyone less dangerous.) The Pentagon wants to reassure us that behind all that bluster and chest thumping, Zarqawi and his cohorts are just hapless poseurs. I know that I ought to feel safe. But there is one little inconvenient fact that interferes with my feeling of safety – Zarqawi hasn’t been captured yet. However clumsy he may be with a sophisticated machine gun, he wields a butcher knife with complete ease.

    "BAGHDAD, IRAQ – The videotape released last week by the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi showed him firing long bursts from a machine gun, his forearms sprouting from beneath black fatigues, as he exuded the very picture of a strong jihadist leader.

    But in clips the U.S. military released Thursday and described as captured outtakes from the same video, al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, cut a different figure.

    In one scene, al-Zarqawi, the most wanted terrorist in Iraq, appears flummoxed by how to discharge the machine gun in fully automatic mode. Off camera, one aide is heard ordering another, "go help the sheik." A man walks over and fiddles with the weapon so al-Zarqawi can fire it in bursts.

    Another sequence shows al-Zarqawi handing the weapon off to other aides and striding away, revealing American-made white jogging shoes beneath his black guerrilla attire. One insurgent later appears to grab the machine gun absent-mindedly by its scalding-hot barrel and drop it."

    Very funny. It should be reassuring that we may indeed be dealing with a bunch of bumbling bullies whose bark is far worse than their bite. But the confidence evaporates somewhat when I am reminded of the the caliber of the macho men who are in charge of keeping us safe from Zarqawi and his ilk.  The words of caution that instantly come to mind are:

    • Osama bin Laden (Wanted Dead or Alive : Bush, 2001)
    • Saddam- 9/11, WMD, Mushroom Cloud (2001 to until recently)
    • The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004
    • Warnings by Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, ex-CIA employees and retired US Generals
    • Katrina, 2005 ("Brownie, you are doing a heckuva job")
    • The recently released book by Clark Kent Ervin, ex Inspector General of Homeland Security

    and the most important reasons that I don’t feel safe is because ….

    • Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld – our very own Keystone Kops, are in charge

  • Colbert II – Rumsfeld Skewered By Ex – CIA Man

    Another moment of truth for this unethical administration in less than a week since Stephen Colbert heroically exposed George W. Bush.  Today  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the matinee idol of Bush’s cabinet was caught flatfooted. His usual glib and dismissive style  deserted him when  Ray McGovern, a 27 year veteran of the CIA challenged Rumsfeld’s pre-war claims of going to war with Iraq – using his OWN words. Colbert’s fearlessness may be proving contagious! Now it is Cheney’s turn to be publicly humiliated.

    ATLANTA (AP) – Protesters repeatedly interrupted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld during a speech Thursday and one man, a former CIA analyst, accused him of lying about Iraq prewar intelligence in an unusually vociferous display of anti-war sentiment.

    “Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?” asked Ray McGovern, the former analyst, during a question-and-answer session.

    “I did not lie,” shot back Rumsfeld, who waved off security guards ready to remove McGovern from the hall at the Southern Center for International Studies. 

    With Iraq war support remaining low, it is not unusual for top Bush administration officials to encounter protests and hostile questions. But the outbursts Rumsfeld confronted on Thursday seemed beyond the usual.

    Three protesters were escorted away by security as each interrupted Rumsfeld’s speech by jumping up and shouting anti-war messages. Throughout the speech, a fourth protester stood in the middle of the room with his back to Rumsfeld in silent protest. Officials reported no arrests.

    Rumsfeld also faced tough questions from a woman identifying herself as Patricia Roberts of Lithonia, Ga., who said her son, 22-year-old Spc. Jamaal Addison, was killed in Iraq. Roberts said she is now raising her young grandson and asked whether the government could provide any help.

    Rumsfeld referred her to a Web site listing aid organizations.

    President Bush seldom faces such challenges. Demonstrators usually are kept far from him when he delivers public remarks.

    More of the exchange from Alter Net.

    Rumsfeld: …it appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

    McGovern: You said you knew where they were.

    Rumsfeld: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and…

    McGovern: You said you knew where they were. Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

    Rumsfeld: My words-my words were that-no-no, wait a minute–wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second…. " 

  • The Colbert Cover Up

    Stephen Colbert’s stunning truth telling "truthiness" at last Saturday’s White House Correspondents‘ Dinner did not go over well with the Bushes. That much is understandable. After all, he tore Bush to shreds, standing four feet away.  But why are the media folks so miffed? There has been a virtual black-out of Colbert in all major media coverage of the event. What little has been covered was used to inform us that he "bombed" like David Letterman at the Oscars! The footage of Bush and his Doppelganger doing their "safe" routine for predictable laughs has been shown again and again. No sign of Stephen Colbert and his fifteen minutes of first rate edgy humor based solely on the actual record of the Bush administration. But it was not the type of humor that an audience consisting mostly of the members of the press, wanted to hear. His jabs hit too close to home. This is what Colbert had to say about the ineffectuality of the press.

    "Let’s review the rules. 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. Put them 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."

    So they are dismissing him as "unfunny." A room full of adults laughed uproariously when Laura Bush told sophomoric jokes about her sex life at last year’s dinner. Yet Colbert’s grown up satire and irony had them pursing their lips with displeasure like so many Victorian prudes. Were they afraid to be seen laughing lest they incur the wrath of the president and his handlers? Or is it that the mainstream press has become so cozy with the government that instead of being an objective investigative body, it has turned into the government’s gatekeeper, upset that an outsider like Colbert did in fifteen minutes what its own members had failed to do in five years?

    The bloggers have noticed and they are writing about the obvious hypocrisy of the big media. Here are two good comments from the Daily Kos and the Daou Report.  The mainstream media may pretend that Stephen Colbert never happened  but we saw him and we will remember. 

  • John Kenneth Galbraith – A Friend of India

    John Kenneth Galbraith, the leading US economist, scholar and diplomat died on Saturday at the age of ninety seven.  I was a young girl in middle school when Galbraith was appointed the US Ambassador to India by President John F. Kennedy. I had no idea what his politics and scholarship were about. But I remember that our parents and teachers spoke of him fondly and the phrase most used to describe him was "A Friend of India". The other distinct recollection I have of him is that I had until then, never seen a man so tall. No other US ambassador has been as well liked in India as Mr. Galbraith was. Here is a tribute to him from the Indian daily, The Hindu.  The article by Harish Khare is not surprisingly, named "A Friend of India."

    A friend of India

    Harish Khare

    Very few Americans have endeared themselves to Indians. John Kenneth Galbraith was an honourable exception.

    TO STATE the obvious, John Kenneth Galbraith, who died on Saturday aged 97, was the greatest American friend of India. No American Ambassador to India, before or after him, brought so much empathy and appreciation to his job as did Professor Galbraith. And no one enjoyed the job so much as he did; nor was anyone else as effective (both in New Delhi and Washington).

    By far the most academically brilliant of the U.S. envoys (with Patrick Moynihan running a close second), Ambassador Galbraith had a robust and sensible understanding of India’s problems. His association with India began years before he came as President John F. Kennedy’s Ambassador. He was among the brilliant group of economists gathered by Professor P.C. Mahalanobis at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta to help in the formulation of the Second Five Year Plan….By the time he took up his ambassadorial assignment, Prof. Galbraith had a fairly good idea of what needed to be done to help India achieve the Nehruvian dreams of industrialising a backward economy.

    Prof. Galbraith was also perhaps the only Ambassador to earn the confidence and respect of Jawaharlal Nehru. Indeed no other envoy has enjoyed that kind of relationship with any of the Indian Prime Ministers. His Ambassador’s Journal, a delightfully-written diary-like account of his stay in New Delhi, tells the reader of the easy relationship with Nehru and even easier access to Teen Murti House….. But Prof. Galbraith was never indiscreet, as is the wont of the current American Ambassadors in New Delhi.

    Prof. Galbraith left Roosevelt House in July 1963, but he remained concerned and interested in India and Indians. Though his economic ideas ceased to be respected much in the United States since the 1980s, his basic argument remains valid: "Economics does indeed concern the fundamental issue of how societies and civilisations work." His concern for "equality" and "justice," are best reflected, according to his authorised biographer, Richard Parker, in Amartya Sen’s works.

    Very few Americans — and only a handful of American envoys — have endeared themselves to Indians, partly because of the U.S.’ record of "dirty Americanism." Prof. Galbraith was an honourable exception.

  • White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Colbert Conquers

    In a chillingly sarcastic roast, last night Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central stood next to George and Laura Bush and did a "comedy" routine that left mouths agape in the room.   At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where the press and the president of the United States are the butt of comedians’ jokes, the invited host ridiculed Bush without using a single obscenity, relying only on Bush’s record as the source of his comedic inspiration.  The merciless lampooning left the initially smiling First Couple with pursed lips.  Colbert was hilarious, clever and deadly accurate.  C-Span has not yet published the transcript. I am linking to a secondary source. Among other things, Colbert took aim at Cheney, Scalia, McCain, global warming, NSA snooping and other assorted right wing mischief. My husband and I watched it on TV and were mesmerized by Colbert’s courage and devastating turn of phrase. If the Democrats have trouble coming up with a persuasive party platform, playing back Colbert’s speech on the campaign trail might do the trick for them in 2006 and 2008.

    "A blistering comedy “tribute” to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.

    Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

    He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.”

    Colbert told Bush he could end the problem of protests by retired generals by refusing to let them retire. He compared Bush to Rocky Balboa in the “Rocky” movies, always getting punched in the face—“and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world.”

    Turning to the war, he declared, "I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

    Colbert also made biting cracks about missing WMDs, “photo ops” on aircraft carriers and at hurricane disasters, melting glaciers and Vice President Cheney shooting people in the face. He advised the crowd, "if anybody needs anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly on into your table numbers and somebody from the N.S.A. will be right over with a cocktail. "

    Observing that Bush sticks to his principles, he said, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday – no matter what happened Tuesday."

    Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was “surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side." He also reflected on the alleged good old days, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story.

    Addressing the reporters, he said, "Let’s review the rules. 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. Put them 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."

    He claimed that the Secret Service name for Bush’s new press secretary is "Snow Job."

    As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling, and handshakes, and left immediately.

    Those seated near Bush told E&P’s Joe Strupp, who was elsewhere in the room, that Bush quickly turned from an amused guest to an obviously offended target as Colbert’s comments brought up his low approval ratings and problems in Iraq. Several veterans of past dinners, who requested anonymity, said the presentation was more directed at attacking the president than in the past. Several said previous hosts, like Jay Leno, equally slammed both the White House and the press corps.

    “This was anti-Bush,” said one attendee. “Usually they go back and forth between us and him.” Another noted that Bush quickly turned unhappy, and left the dais shortly after while most seated near him, including Colbert and Snow, glad-handed the crowd. “You could see he stopped smiling about halfway through Colbert,” he reported."

    Update: Daily Kos has the complete transcript.  Enjoy!