More on humor, fear, postmodernism, Republicans, overanalysis, bears, etc.

On further reflection, perhaps Colbert, a Gen X-er who attended college in the '80s, is, in addition to the earning of a respectable living through the facilitation of laughter, attempting to deconstruct the news. Why didn't I think of it before?

Unfortunately, as with Western philosophy and literary theory, I don't know if cable/mainstream journalism is going to deconstruct itself (to reveal a newborn Walter Cronkite sitting on a lotus, underneath it all) so much as slowly and crappily devolve to the level of Fox News (although PBS may hold out for awhile... as Bush said in his remarks on the economy earlier this week, "I'm an optimistic people.")

But to prove I haven't completely forgotten how to laugh in the presence of a Republican presidential candidate, these lines from a McCain event today made me giggle, even more than the letter he likes to mention from the former drunken sailor who resents being compared to members of Congress.

OK, and I laughed at Huckabee on Colbert, too. But the prospect of him as our next president still scares the hell out of me. OK, McCain scares me a little bit, too. The last pol known to have broached the subject of criminal human-bear relations was Scooter Libby.

MCCAIN: And what happened? We presided over the largest increase in the size of government in history, but more importantly -- more importantly -- we allowed corruption to creep into the way we did business, my friends, and we've got to fix it. And as president, I'm going to fix it.

You know, a few years ago, we spent $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana.

Now, I don't know if that's a paternity issue or a criminal issue...