Stephen Colbert

I should begin by making something clear. Splicing together two parts of a speech to give the impression they were one unbroken excerpt is a grave professional error, and would be viewed as such by any broadcaster in the business. The error would be egregious even if there were no suggestion it reinforced the accusation that Donald Trump was inciting riotous behavior, simply because what viewers thought they witnessed did not occur. There is no excusing what the BBC did to Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech. Nobody in the senior ranks of the BBC is to blame for not knowing about this at the time; but once it did become known, an immediate and unconditional apology should have been made.

“When you die at the palace, you really die at the palace,” laments Comicus, the ancient Roman “stand-up philosopher” played by Mel Brooks in his iconic, if not exactly well received, History of the World, Part I (1981). Forced to improvise a comedy routine for Dom DeLuise’s Emperor Nero, Comicus repeatedly puts his foot squarely in his mouth, insulting the capricious ruler for his corruption and weight. An enraged Nero sentences him to death, setting up a madcap escape sequence.

In June 2021, Jon Stewart appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and ridiculed people that dismissed the possibility of a lab leak origin for Covid. He quipped: “Oh my God! There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened? ‘Oh, I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or it’s the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it.” At the time, former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Stewart’s rhetoric “dangerous and short-sighted.” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman fumed that “celebrities” shouldn’t be considered reliable sources of information and Forbes rounded up viewers uncomfortable with Stewart’s words.

Cockburn remembers well the Colbert Insurrection back in June, when several staffers on Stephen Colbert's Late Show were arrested for trespassing at the Capitol. Yet he's since been surprised to learn that the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has dropped all charges. Despite the clear and evident danger of the Colbert staffers, the Capitol Police released a statement saying: The United States Capitol Police was just informed the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia is declining to prosecute the case. We respect the decision that office has made. Any questions about that decision should be referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. If the Colbert crew got their cases dismissed, then what about the January 6ers?

“Somebody had to say it,” and apparently that somebody is comedian Jim Breuer. In a set that broke Twitter over the July 4 weekend, Breuer came right out and delivered the news: vaccinations didn’t stop Covid. Mandates are stupid. Social distancing is meaningless. The entire Covid regime under which we’ve lived, to various degrees, for the last two-plus years is a worthless and sinister form of social control. Breuer’s twelve-minute routine on The Pandemic isn’t very good. His physical comedy doesn’t hit; the depictions of the vaccine are sloppy-looking, and he accompanies them with a dumb raspberry noise. His “Broadway musical” bit could be funny except that nothing he does resembles a current Broadway musical in the slightest.

When Cockburn heard the news of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show staffers being arrested at the Capitol, he knew this case was no joke (unlike Colbert's show). On June 16, seven of them were arrested for trespassing in the Longworth House Office Building. The Washington Examiner reports that the Capitol Police said, “Responding officers observed seven individuals, unescorted and without Congressional ID, in a sixth-floor hallway. ...The building was closed to visitors, and these individuals were determined to be a part of a group that had been directed by the USCP to leave the building earlier in the day.” However, this testimony contradicts what Stephen Colbert himself said when he brought it up on his show Monday night.