Apparently somebody forgot to tell the Denver Post that Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central is satire.
Initially acknowledging the “TV funnyman” is a “mock-conservative,” the Post then actually bothered to fact check his “Even Better-er Know a District” segment profiling Colorado’s “Fighting Second” Congressional District and its freshman Rep. Jared Polis.
The Post pointed out that in his intro piece leading up to the Polis interview, Colbert inaccurately depicted grizzly bears as part of the state’s fauna, even though “grizzlies haven’t been common in Colorado for a century; nor can Boulder be seen from the ski slopes at Vail 115 miles away, as the research-challenged comic declared.”
Uh, here’s more news for the Post: except in beer commercials, we don’t actually have giant volleyball players spiking over the Continental Divide.
As for the interview itself, some of the best stuff came when Colbert grilled Polis on being the first openly gay man to be elected to Congress, satirically wondering if it was a ploy to get elected in a liberal district.
Polis pointed out being gay isn’t a choice, which led Colbert to respond that he chooses to be heterosexual because, “I love the ladies,” and it would have been “a breeze” to love men because he knows what men like. Men, in the Colbert Nation anyway, love to do beer bongs and other guy stuff (Polis joined Colbert in funneling a Coors Light).
As for the notion that being gay would earn votes in CD2, which extends from Boulder to the more conservative western reaches of Eagle County, that satirical stretch will be tested today at 4:30 when Polis conducts a health care town hall in Edwards –- what the Vail Mountaineer Wednesday called “the lunatic fringe” of Polis’s diverse district.
In a front-page banner story, the politically conservative Mountaineer quoted from The Colorado Independent’s coverage of Polis’s recent town hall in Boulder, a mob scene where he boiled down the debate by saying, “Some people fear the government more than the insurance companies, but some people fear the insurance companies more than the government.”
And now after Polis’s memorable turn on “The Colbert Report,” some people fear avalanches at Colorado ski areas. Colbert likely got the marketing types at Vail, Beaver Creek and Copper Mountain excited with his opening-segment mention, in which he pretended to bound down the slopes of Vail on skis. But they may have been less psyched when he closed by pretending to trigger a massive (mock) avalanche.
Similarly rough treatment could be in store for Polis this afternoon in nearby Edwards.
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