Back from his vacation, Stephen sends up Senator Jim “Creme” DeMint (R-SC) and his “Waterloo” meme.  DeMint articulated what became the Republican strategy to “break” Obama by defeating the administration’s effort to reform health care in July, 2009.

Now that the Democrats have successfully passed reform, DeMint has taken to pushing back the goal posts, telling Face the Nation‘s Bob Schieffer that the true test of the GOP’s cynical strategy will come with the results of the 2010 midterm elections.

Stephen, of course, has some fun with DeMint’s assessment:

Stephen Colbert sat down with Nell Irvin Painter to discuss her new book:  The History of White People.  Painter proves to be a good sport as Stephen, unable to see race, ponders why such a history would be necessary.

Though the interview imparts little about the book, if it even approaches the value of Painter’s grassroots history of the Progressive Era, Standing at Armageddon, it will be well worth reading.

This was Colbert’s second historian interview in as many days, having previously sat down with Eric Foner to discuss the Texas Board of Education’s recent revisionist effort.

Stephen sends up the Fox “News” Channel pundits for their idiotic equating of recent heavy snowfall with “proof” that climate change isn’t happening.

FNC really must hold their viewers in the lowest intellectual regard.

Sadly, it takes a satirist to illustrate how pundits have framed Obama as both, a tyrant bent on the destruction of America, and an inept president who was unable to accomplish anything during his first year in office.

Of course, neither assessment is correct.

Again, Stephen Colbert displays why satire is the perfect lens through which to analyze the Republican Party.  Playing on comparisons of the RNC’s 10 requirements — of which potential candidates must adhere to eight to receive funding — to the Biblical Ten Commandments, Colbert listed some of its strict conservative prescriptions and noted, “They’re just like the 10 Commandments, if one of the tablets said ‘F’ and the other said ‘U.’”

(more below the clip)

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There is one bit of irony I wish Colbert would have touched on.  As I noted recently on Care2, the RNC’s decission to name their test after Ronald Reagan seems curious considering he — nor any other modern president — could have passed.

From the Care2 post:

What struck me most about Bopp’s memo was not its requirements, but its invocation of Reagan.  Employing his name becomes more significant when paired with first item on the purity list:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

That they have chosen to emphasize this economic platform along with its patron saint is certainly no coincidence.  Reagan’s conservative economic prescriptions have been touted as the height of Republican fiscal discipline so frequently that they’ve achieved commandment status within the party.  That this commonly held notion is demonstrably false speaks volumes about what this “purity test” represents… (Read More)