freedom of what?

This past weekend, I was reading my favorite SF Chron columnist Neva Chonin (Live! Rude! Girl!) who enlightened me about the news event of the past week I'd managed to miss when I took two days off work. Chonin was bringing readers like me up to speed regarding Stephen Colbert's brave speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner in which he roasted the Commander-in-Thief over an open flame. Colbert isn't a "real" journalist, whatever that means in this day and age of wimpy press that cower down to their corporate owners. He comes from cheekier, braver stock: His Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, is a spin-off of Jon Stewart's much ballyhooed The Daily Show.

Some news outlets, such as C-SPAN, are pulling the video of Colbert's dry-as-a-James-Bond martini speech from the web, in deference to the freedom to squelch creativity and genius, I suppose. Who needs the truth, sigh, when we can have freeze-dried pellets of news that come straight from the presidential press secretary? Bully for Colbert! In this seemingly never-ending era of deception and Orwellian doublespeak, a guy with his cajones is just what we need.