Newly Nested: Are You For Parry with an “A”?

I have discovered how much of a TV junkie I am this summer.  Without my favorite network shows airing during the summer I have turned to watching MSNBC and CNN nightly.  Thursday night I even made sure to tune in to Lawrence O’Donnell Live after the Republican debate in Iowa.  That’s when I was faced with a question: Is Stephen Colbert a man in makeup who can’t be trusted?  Who never reveals his face? Is Stephen Colbert the runner of a dirty filthy Super PAC with dirty filthy money?  Is he even worse than Nigerian spammers with his “Spiders In Your Hair” email?

To see what I am talking about you can watch the clip below:

I had no idea how Lawrence O’Donnell felt about Colbert until I tuned in to Laurence’s show The Last Word. I was dumbfounded at how appalled some people were by the antics of a show that airs on Comedy Central (might be your first clue not to take Colbert too seriously).  To be honest, I’ve been more of a Rachel Maddow fan, she seems to often make similar points to Colbert, just in a more “let me hit you over the head with a club” kind of way.  But where do Stephen Colbert’s politics fall?  And does it really matter?

There is a great divide in my house.  I am a leftist Democrat and my husband is a leftist Republican.  Oddly enough we agree more on politics than we disagree, but still it is very clear that we view the world of politics completely differently.  One particular glaring disagreement is where we decide to get our news.  I watch the news, granted sometimes from biased sources like MSNBC, while my husband decided over a year ago, to only receive his news from Stephen Colbert or John Stewart. When I was watching the Lawrence O’Donnell segment, my husband was chuckling in disbelief that he didn’t see that it was a joke; a joke that was aimed at making fun of the corporate use of untracable money through Super-PACs in campaigns.

I really hadn’t put much thought into Colbert’s PAC, but there is a point that could be made.  The commercial that Colbert is running is encouraging people to write in the name “Rick Parry,” a false candidate, at the Iowa Ames Straw Poll.  If someone had done this to a Democrat I would be furious.  Is that really fair politics?  Should we be concerned that people are donating money to someone without knowing what he really stands for even if he is just making jokes?  I’m on the fence.  I’d like to be able to “take” the joke, but at the same time it saddens me to see our political system has turned into a big joke.  A joke that has garnered attention from a news station that then in turns reports on it seriously.  What do you think?