The Colbert Blackout Washington Post:

The traditional media's first reaction to satirist Stephen Colbert's uncomfortably harsh mockery of President Bush and the press corps at Saturday night's White House Correspondents Association dinner was largely to ignore it. Instead, the coverage primarily focused on the much safer, self-deprecatory routine in which Bush humorously paired up with an impersonator playing his inner self. The result, however, was a wave of indignation from the liberal side of the blogosphere over what some considered a willful disregard of the bigger story: That a captive, peevish president (and his media lapdogs) actually had to sit and listen as someone explained to them what they had done wrong; that the Bush Bubble was forcibly violated, right there on national television. Now the mainstream media is back with its second reaction: Colbert just wasn't funny.
ah.....of course.

----Paul Bedard writes for U.S. News: .. 'Colbert crossed the line,' said one top Bush aide, who rushed out of the hotel as soon as Colbert finished. Another said that the president was visibly angered by the sharp lines that kept coming. 'I've been there before, and I can see that he is [angry],' said a former top aide. 'He's got that look that he's ready to blow.'
----Scott Collins writes in his Los Angeles Times column:"The crowd included many of the same people who've built Colbert up into the hottest thing to hit the Beltway since Karl Rove. Now he comes and pokes fun of them and most of them sat there in their finery looking stone-faced and glum. Did they find Colbert's routine as messy as I did? Maybe. But it seems a lot more likely that the D.C. journos are proving humor-impaired when anyone points out their performance in the run-up to the Iraq war. Hey, you invited Colbert. If you don't want to yuk it up, do a raffle."
----Noam Scheiber writes in the New Republic: "My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left [!!] -- until recently more common on the right -- wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value."
----Chris Durang writes for Huffingtonpost.com: "The media's ignoring Colbert's effect at the White House Correspondents Dinner is a very clear example of what others have called the media's penchant for buying into the conservative/rightwing 'narrative.' In this instance, the 'narrative' is that President Bush, for all his missteps, has a darling sense of humor and is a real regular guy, able to poke delightful fun at himself and his penchant for mis-using and mispronouncing words. Who cares if he lied to start a war? (Or chose to ignore all contrary opinion, which as far as war-starting goes, is pretty crummy.) Who cares if he declares he's above the law, and according to the Boston Globe yesterday there are something like 750 laws he's decided don't apply to him as 'Commander-in-Chief'? . . . Colbert's was a brave and shocking performance. And for the media to pretend it isn't newsworthy is a total bafflement. And a symbol of how shoddy and suspect the media is."
----Michael Scherer writes in Salon that Colbert's "imitation of the quintessential GOP talking head -- Bill O'Reilly meets Scott McClellan -- uncovered the inner workings of the ever-cheapening discourse that passes for political debate. . . .It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld, or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham."

Meanwhile, over at thankyoustephencolbert.org , there are more than 20,000 thank-yous and counting.