The Fall Of Colbert – Opportunity Missed

The soft “firing” of ex-comedian and now-Democrat hack Stephen Colbert has generated the usual clutching of pearls on the left and shouts of vindication on the right ("soft" because, if any of us gets fired, we get two weeks, maximum, of severance pay, not 10 more months). CBS, home of the Colbert late evening show and subordinate to Paramount, explained that the move to cancel the show was due to “financial” reasons. Maybe. After all, the show cost the network $100 million annually, with Colbert drawing an estimated $15 million of that amount. But there’s probably more to it than that.

If a dictionary ever produced a definition of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it should include a picture of Stephen Colbert to accompany it. And that’s saying a mouthful, given the plentiful choices of high-profile people so infected. It follows, then, that Colbert’s audience (both viewing and in studio) consists of lefties who hate Trump almost as much as he does. We could argue all day long about whether the reason CBS/Paramount cited is valid or not, but that would be a colossal waste of time. My thought is that the main “financial reason” had more to do with what the network stood to lose if Colbert kept running his loose mouth about Trump. After all, Paramount was recently burned by its loss in the doctored Kamala Harris interview lawsuit, to the tune of $16 million. Dems are calling this “bribe” money; I’d say “poetic justice” is a lot more appropriate. And when Colbert condemned his bosses’ so-called capitulation to the Trump camp, that may have been the death knell for his show.

Rob Schmitt, a respected commentator on Newsmax, believes that Colbert was not only preaching to the choir of hard-core Trump-hating lefties, he was also trying to shame the rest of us into seeing things his way. The problem with that analysis is that 99 percent of the “rest of us” weren’t bothering to watch. What we are seeing in the rise of Greg Gutfeld’s conservative-leaning late-night show and its increasing popularity is analogous to what happened when a left-leaning radio program tried to compete with Rush Limbaugh. There was simply no contest – Rush was right, he could have beaten them with “one-half of his brain tied behind his back just to make it fair,” as he often said with a chuckle.

The fall of Colbert is a case study on what a destructive thing TDS can be when someone succumbs to it. Instead of trying to emulate the proven success of previous late-night hosts Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, Colbert arrogantly believed that he was positioned to destroy Trump using his platform, and from day one of Trump’s first campaign that was his mission in life. The shame of this is that Carson and Leno could only dream of the low-hanging fruit today’s political leaders produce almost daily for a true comedian. Carson was wildly popular because he poked fun at both sides of the aisle equally with his razor-sharp wit, and Leno was right behind him in this regard. Imagine what they could be doing today with people like Trump, Biden, Harris, Walz, et al. to skewer. The jokes would practically write themselves. Note that I purposefully omitted David Letterman from the role model list, since he became bitterly anti-Bush and a slobbering Obama fan near the end of his otherwise good tenure.

And yet, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, those on the left will insist that Colbert is the innocent victim of a corporate media giant surrendering to a Mussolini-like leader (Trump). This is as ridiculous as their claim when Dan Rather was released after his scandalous reporting on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, that the Bush Administration “pressure” forced CBS’s hand. What they fail to see, in their inimitable way, is that counterbalancing actions are long overdue as a response to the heavy hand of “cancel-culture” that plagued us over the last several years. If there’s any capitulation on Paramount’s part, it is this: they are not going to replace Colbert, probably because they could not withstand the blowback from their leftist supporters if they failed to choose a Colbert-wannabe. To the crazies, it would be anathema if Paramount were to choose someone who (1) was more politically moderate than Colbert, and (2) actually liked to make people laugh. As an aside, it will be interesting to see what ABC does with the equally loathsome Jimmy Kimmel in the wake of Colbert’s release.