I see what you did there [a]

It's old news, but watching Bill O'Reilly conduct a serious interview with Stephen Colbert was highly entertaining. Sure Colbert's ad absurdum conservatism and nationalism is good for a laugh, but much more profound is the fact that a self-respecting tv personality is interviewing a fictitious character as if he were real. Like if Larry King were to interview Matthew Fox and ask him what it's like to be marooned in the South Pacific... or if Dan Quayle were to verbally attack Murphy Brown.

That's fine. O RLY can interview a contrived persona and cross-examine exaggerated versions of his own arguments. It's all confined to the domain of entertainment.

But Stephen's appearance on Meet the Press is something new altogether. Tim Russert interviewed Stephen as a presidential candidate, choosing the Comedy Central persona over the actual Stephen Colbert. Meanwhile, the actual Stephen Colbert is a doing a good job of exposing some peculiarities of government and media:

• News sources and pundits don't constrain their content to reality.
  
• The media will entertain outlandishly prejudiced and backwards viewpoints.
  
• One can run for public office on a platform that is in no way representative of one's own values. Like Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and David Vitter except we know it's all b.s. beforehand.

This campaign is like the dumb snowboarder bouncing off moguls and trees before he ultimately comes to rest at the bottom of the slope. I'm silently cheering for it to keep going, but I know the farther he gets, the sadder I'll be at the end.

In conclusion, I can't wait to go skiing, pre-Thanksgiving is this weekend, d'Oakland d'Boomstick is 6-3, and an excerpt from Saturday...
T: You totally lost control there.
C: Traction doesn't equal control.