Stephen Colbert applauds Bill O'Reilly's brilliant borderline-heresy.

Hilarious Stephen Colbert monologue from earlier this month. Merry Christmas, y'all.

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The Colbert Report: 'Prescott Oil Loves the Earth'

Stephen Colbert introduces one of the most brilliant advertising parodies I've seen in a while. You know how oil companies are always lying shamelessly about themselves in their ads, by portraying themselves as performing a function that is directly antithetical to the function that they in point of fact perform? (Feel like I could maybe have put that more succinctly...)

Anyway: here's the ad for Prescott Oil:

John McCain is a neocon. And he's advised by the neocons. To vote for John McCain is to beg for 12 continuous years of neoconservatism.

That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen. You know, at first, when John McCain said that he was the candidate of "CHANGE," I thought: That's great!! That way, no matter who wins the election in November, we'll have "CHANGE!" And isn't the need for "CHANGE" something we can all agree on?

Remember Bill Kristol? Yeah, that Bill Kristol; the guy whose tactics for pushing the United States into Iraq included intellectual dishonesty, the adopting of his trademarked self-righteous facial expression of moral superiority, the relentless running of misleading, highly speculative and tendentious and sometimes downright mendacious articles in his ultra-neocon publication The Weekly Standard in order to advance the perception in Washington that war with Iraq was inevitable? The hypocrite who will open his big, smug, wealthy-donor teat-suckling mouth and rattle off a series of just-received GOP talking points in a manner that masquerades as well-informed, individual expertise? The guy who's now, with other neocons, marching us toward a military confrontation with Iran?

The Bill Kristol who accepted millions of dollars in funding from shady ultraconservative organizations like the Bradley Foundation and the Olin Corporation in order to form think tanks like the Project for a New American Century (a.k.a. "PNAC," which also included Paul Wolfowitz, Randy Scheunemann, Robert Kagan, Richard Pearle, William Bennett, Gary Schmitt, Thomas Donnelly, and most of the other celebrity neocons you can think of), in which policy positions and propaganda points on how to push our country into war with Iraq and then Iran were laid out in detail?

You know, the guy featured herein:



(By the way, this must be among Stephen Colbert's greatest-ever moments.)

A vote for John McCain is a vote for Bill "Lies with a Straight Face" Kristol. That Bill Kristol. The William Kristol of The Weekly Standard who now has his own column in the formerly respectable New York Times. (Hope it doesn't seem like I'm worked up about this...)

That must be the "CHANGE" that McCain/Bush is talking about. McCain/Bush. Bush/McCain. La la dee da. McCain/Bush/Bush/Bush/McCain/Mcain. Neoconservatives, the ones who have fashioned our foreign policy for the past eight years, the ones who figured out how to trick us into invading Iraq -- even though most of us weren't tricked because. after all, we saw right through what they were doing. But of course, the thing is, well....we didn't have...uh...any power to stop them.

Nor would we, as it happens, have any power to stop the neocons like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann (of whom, more in a moment) under a President McCain. Robert Kagan, by the way, is one of McCain's official foreign policy advisers, a man who would be certain to hold some kind of important position in a McCain administration [which would be indistinguishable, after all, from the Bush administration]. McCain, acting upon the advice of Kagan, will be sure to send us to Iran as quickly as you can say "Gone are our civil liberties, which will continue to be gone forever if you vote for John McCain."

Don't believe me about Kagan? Robert Kagan -- unlike Bill Kristol, toward whom any ad hominem is fair game as far as I'm concerned -- is an amiable enough bloke, but unfortunately, he's eager for us to go to war with Iran and...apparently...Russia. Here's just an introduction to the man and his plan. Remember, he's one among many of John Neocon McCain's neoconservative foreign policy advisers:



Like I said, not as unctuous or viscerally offensive as Kristol. But he's got war on his mind. He can taste it on his tongue. He can feel it in the ripples of fat that cascade up and down his chiny-chin-chin.

So, wait. George W. Bush's 'foreign policy', so to speak, was/is conducted by neocons, in whose number we must include, of course, Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Randy Scheunemann, Richard Pearle, et al. And don't forget Condi. But anyway, so...the "CHANGE" we'd experience under Neocon John McCain...This must be a species of "CHANGE" with which I'm as of yet unacquainted. Its exact nature is kind of elusive, isn't it? I mean, as "CHANGE" goes, McCain's version is kind of...um...static, isn't it?

Presumably, the "CHANGE" that McCain is talking about is......Is he just talking about the fact that, under a McCain administration, we'd live each and every day of our lives quaking with the fear that that cloying, screechy-voiced, sociopathic, book-burning bitch could become our president? That would, of course, represent a "CHANGE." I continue, as before, to find it difficult to believe that the GOP faithful really want that person to win.

Anyway. My vote goes, as before, to Barack Obama.

For more discussion of McCain's neoconservatism, and his ties with assorted neoconservatives, particularly Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann, see:

• The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan on McCain's preexisting shady intelligence-gathering and fiscal dealings with hard-core neocon Randy Scheunemann--who is now McCain's Senior Foreign Policy Adviser--and McCain's and Scheunemann's longstanding desire to ignite a conflict between Georgia and Russia, with the United States intervening militarily on Georgia's behalf.
• A piece, featured on therealnews.com, on Randy Scheunemann, "John McCain’s Senior Foreign Policy Adviser, Lobbyist, and a former director of the neo conservative Project for a New American Century." Journalist Chip Berlet reports:

...Scheunemann would play a very major role in shaping McCain's foreign policy... We have in the past had Henry Kissinger and all kinds of other high-profile people, like Zbigniew Brzezinski [inaudible]. It's hard to predict if Scheunemann would play that role, but he wouldn't play that role in as pragmatic a way as Kissinger or Brzezinski played. I mean, we're talking about a very aggressive, pro-militarist, pro-interventionist neoconservative ideologue here who made Kissinger and Brzezinski seem almost like Buddhists in comparison.

...[Under Scheunemann, we can expect] an aggressive kind of foreign policy for the United States which claims the right to intervene diplomatically, and then militarily, in any struggle around the world by constructing that struggle as having an important national security issue involved, so that no matter where there is some kind of trouble, through this McCain foreign policy, controlled by Scheunemann one presumes, we're going to claim the right to intervene instantly, first with sanctions and then with tanks and jets and bombs, to suggest that people need to sort of get in line with our needs. And this is a very, obviously, arrogant foreign policy, and what it's going to do is to continue to separate the United States from the world diplomatic community, which has already grown quite unhappy with the kind of bullying that the United States feels comfortable with. And it'll only get worse in that sense, in terms of an aggressive militarism rooted in this neocon idea of exporting "global democracy," quote-unquote. (Check out the rest of the report.)

• Michael I. Nimon on McCain and his Neocon approach to Georgia in Artvoice (Buffalo, NY)
• Philip Giraldi, "John McCain and the Neocon resurgence"
• Jacob Heilburn on the Neocon canonization of John McCain in The Huffington Post
• Alec Baldwin (yeah, that one) describes the neoconservatism of Sarah Palin in The Huffington Post

Thomas Frank on The Colbert Report

Thomas Frank discusses his new book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule with Stephen Colbert, the latter in full-tilt on-screen persona mode. Frank: "What you have misunderstood, Stephen, is that the argument of the book is that conservatives suck."



Thomas Frank is unquestionably one of my favorite people: he's a great writer, he's funny as hell and his politics are exactly on the money. Most importantly, he takes the piss out of hypocrites and con-artists in a voice that updates the polemical stylings of the old-timey, mustachioed populists.

See his regular column in The Wall Street Journal 'The Tilting Yard', read his books, all of which are outstanding, and either recall fondly or discover afresh the grandeur that was/is The Baffler.