Bush 'ready to blow' over Colbert

George W. Bush is furious over comic Stephen Colbert's brutal performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday.

Top aides to the president told U.S. News & World Report that Bush was so mad he was "ready to blow."

Performing the same flag-waving loudmouth idiot routine he does on the cable-news satire "The Colbert Report," the comedian savaged Bush and the White House. The dazed president looked like a retarded kid being stomped by street toughs.

"Colbert crossed the line," a top Bush aide told the magazine after fleeing the dinner and Bush's wrath.

A "former top aide" told U.S. News that Bush's anger was clearly visible, and that administration officials have learned to fear that look as a warning of another insane tantrum.

"He's got that look that he's ready to blow," the insider said after the Colbert spectacle.

But the real target of Colbert's attack was the Washington press, those grossly overpaid typists who blindly "reported" whatever the administration told them to report for five devastating years -- an era that many historians are already calling the last days of the United States.

"Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming," Colbert told the grim-faced media drunks. "We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew."

"But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!"

The D.C. media gathered at the formal dinner were delighted with every bit of moronic vaudeville that passes for entertainment at these White House Correspondents' dinners -- after all, these are the same people who become absolutely giddy when some washed-up television actor shows up to these tributes to propaganda and mediocrity.

But their reaction to Colbert was mute horror. A few nervous gigglers caught on camera actually pulled the old fake coughing routine with the hand over the mouth.

The video -- broadcast on CSPAN and now available all over the Internet -- makes perfectly clear that Washington media people live in utter fear of angering Bush and his thugs. At times, Bush is even seen looking around the room, mentally noting who laughed at the cruelly accurate "comedy routine."

The media's painfully uncomfortable silence continued through the weekend and to Monday, when the usual self-congratulatory reports of the dinner appeared on television and in newspapers -- but with hardly a mention of Colbert's indictment of the president and the press.

The New York Times -- a "liberal" newspaper that was successfully used as the White House mouthpiece on disasters such as the invasion of Iraq -- acted like the painful monologue never happened.

(Four days later, the Times posted a story about the lack of a story.)

Network and cable news focused on a joyless bit of slapstick involving the actual Bush and an actor who does a toothless Bush impersonation for the Jay Leno show.

Some self-proclaimed "liberal media" people who attended the dinner made excuses for ignoring the Colbert outrage.

A "liberal" reporter named Noam Scheiber in Washington wrote on some political website, "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."

What Scheiber and his dim-witted colleagues fail to understand is that it wasn't supposed to be entertaining to the tuxedo-clad propagandists gathered at the dinner. They were, in fact, the target.