Where’s the Remote

COLBERT FOR PRESIDENT If you still haven’t seen it, ya gotta check out Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Of course the mainstream media think he bombed—he didn’t cut them any more slack than he did Bush. And that’s why he’s my favorite talking head on the planet. Hey—they invited him! To see someone with the balls to say the Emperor has no clothes, check it out at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879. As a side note, the video clip has become so popular—and widely bootlegged—that C-SPAN entered into an agreement with Google to post an official version. Other Web sites featuring the video were politely requested to take it down.

SIX THUMBS UP I recently added HBO and am finally watching daily reruns of Six Feet Under. Sure, I’d read about the show and could have gone and rented the series, but slacking is my thing, and that requires expending as little energy as possible in order to be adequately entertained.

The Fishers, their funeral home and incidental adventures make this one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. I can grab each holographically three-dimensional character, pull them out of the set for further scrutiny, and then return them to the screen to keep going in the highest resolution. They’ve achieved hyper-reality: With each episode I find something exotically intimate revealed as never before conveyed on the boob tube.

The other night’s episode, “Twilight (2003),” showed both the episode’s featured corpse (a man who received a lethal injection at the beginning of the hour) and then later, 18-year-old Claire Fisher getting an abortion, both visually linked up by the I.V. stuck in their arms.

In a powerful moment in another episode, a girl walking alone at night ends up being run over by a car as she steps into the street to escape some boys in pursuit of her. As one of the boys tells it at her funeral, they were friends, and she was so strong and independent they couldn’t believe she was afraid of them, but when she looked back and realized who they were, just before being hit by the car, her look said, “Why would you do this to me?” Don’t mean to get all heavy on you, but I had to write about the show dominating my TiVo. It’s that good.

REALITY BANISHING Watching Saturday morning re-runs of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County somehow works as an effective chaser to all the bad news I read in the newspaper. Never-ending war in Iraq, $3.50 gas prices, “Deciders” and other Bushit can bring one down on her day off. But dial up that Bravo reality programming, and life is suddenly ludicrous, with 85 percent of women having breast implants, blatant Botox parties and VMDs (vehicles of mass destruction): “When you’re in Coto, no one really cares about fuel economy.” By now the series has ended, but you can be sure to catch the reruns, or maybe they’ll be “unspired” enough to make another season.

http://hotair.com/archives/top-picks/2006/04/30/wh-correspondents-dinner-bush-kills-colbert-bombs/