Speaking Truth to Morons

The reaction of the angry left to the coverage of the White House Correspondent's Dinner performances by President Bush/Steve Bridges and Stephen Colbert is really entertaining. Over at the Huffington Post, a regular hang-out of angry lefties, one brave blogger, Nathan Gardels, wrote a piece which basically said that President Bush's routine clearly outshone Colbert's act, an opinion which seems to be confirmed by most of the reporting I've seen from the event (I have yet to see a single frame of film of Colbert on any of the mainstream media broadcasts). The lefties went wild, hitting Gardels with hundreds of insulting comments.

Gardels made the mistake of responding to moronic masses that populate the HuffPo:

Now that blogs have been around a while, let's coin a new term: the blog mob. Reading the hundreds of vitriol-laden attacks over my last blog (Bush Disarms Comedy Central's Colbert) makes me feel like a Danish cartoonist who has wondered into a Taliban parade.

[...]

Insulting the Prophet is one thing, but insulting Stephen Colbert, the patron saint of the piously correct left! That's really blasphemy. Doesn't this blog mobbery alarm anyone else? It can't be such a good thing if this is where the heralded evolution of the new media is leading.

He was rewarded with hundreds of additional insulting comments. You'd think he would have learned from the first experience. The whole thing is pretty hilarious (with the exception of Colbert, that is).

UPDATE from Political Diary:

"I'm a big Stephen Colbert fan, a huge Bush detractor, and I think the White House press corps has been out to lunch for much of the last five years... [but] I laughed out loud maybe twice during Colbert's entire 20-odd minute routine. Colbert's problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn't very entertaining" -- Noam Scheiber, an editor at the New Republic, writing on last Saturday's White House Correspondent's Dinner.

UPDATE 2 from Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:

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.