Stephen Colbert, Racist: The unfunny “comedian” mocks Asians and calls it satire.
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National Review ^ | 04/02/2014 | Michelle Malkin
Question: Who are the most prominent public purveyors of Asian stereotypes and ethnic language-mocking in America?
The right answer is liberal Hollywood and Democrats.
The wrong and slanderous answer is conservatives, which is what liberal performance artist/illegal-alien-amnesty lobbyist Stephen Colbert wants Americans to believe. Last week on his Comedy Central show, Colbert resurrected his “satirical” 2005 “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong” skit, in which he speaks in pidgin English with a grossly exaggerated accent. He used it in a boneheaded attempt to ridicule Republican football team owner Dan Snyder and others who defend the Washington Redskins’ name.
“Oh, I ruv tea. It’s so good for you. You so pretty, American girl,” Colbert, in his conservative talk-show host persona, jibber-jabbers in the 2005 segment. “You come here. You kiss my tea make her sweet. I need no sugar when you around. Come on my rickshaw, I give you a ride to Bangkok.” Forward to 2014: To mock Snyder’s recent creation of a foundation to benefit Native Americans, Colbert replayed the skit and jeered in character that he was “willing to show the Asian community that I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”
Last week, a group of diehard liberals, led by young Korean-American writer Suey Park, gave Colbert a hard time about his cringe-worthy act, which was accompanied by an awkward laugh track and left the distinct impression that the real Colbert enjoys crude ethnic-language mockery just a little too much.
Park and her liberal Twitter followers tenaciously questioned Colbert’s use of “satire” that ends up stoking the racism it purports to mock and abhor. They obviously picked the incendiary #CancelColbert hashtag to force attention to their complaints. My view is and always has been that the answer to speech you disagree with is more and better speech. For me, #CancelColbert wasn’t about censoring his show. It was about exposing his hypocrisy and don’t-you-understand-satire double standards.
Park complained that Colbert and his defenders are race-baiting liberals who hide behind their self-professed progressivism. Absolutely. Progressives of pallor — hipster racists — have said and done some of the most bigoted things I’ve ever witnessed in my life, and they’ve gotten away with it. And as one viewer noted, Colbert “obviously didn’t use satire very effectively, because most people aren’t talking about the Redskins issue or Dan Snyder.” Indeed, many of his fans were too busy tweeting non-satirical anti-Asian bigotry, misogyny, and ugly death threats.
I’m not surprised at many on the right who tripped over themselves to side with the entertainment industry Cool People — or “coolists,” as Greg Gutfeld brilliantly captures them in his new book, Not Cool. In elite circles, it is uncool to say you think Stephen Colbert is unfunny. The suck-ups go along with Colbert’s painfully inane Ching-Chong Ding-Dong schtick because they want to show they “get” Cool Colbert’s “satire.”
Wake up. These smug liberal elites are not your allies in the fight against political correctness run amok. Colbert and company marginalize conservatism while laughing all the way to the bank. Why would conservatives enable them? Gutfeld explains: “Pick a political, cultural, or moral universe, and in each one it’s the cool who seek to punish, mock, or thwart the uncool. They do this freely and without much resistance, for exacting cool revenge is so common that the uncool let it happen without a fight — a sort of cultural Stockholm syndrome.”
Asians are also convenient, “uncool” punching bags. Unlike offended Muslim fanatics (see “The Mohammed Cartoons”), they’re not going to issue fatwas, threaten beheadings, or blow themselves up. Coward Colbert and his cable-news persona would never dare offend the jihad-friendly brigade at CAIR; the only jabs he takes are at “Islamophobe” conservatives who worry about the poisonous spread of sharia law.
Colbert defenders “circled the wagons,” as Rush Limbaugh pointed out on Monday, by griping instead about Limbaugh’s 18-second imitation on radio of a Chinese government translator in 2011. “Notice how to get this guy out of the mess that he’s in — apparently they have to link him to me. Why? I don’t know.”
Colbert needs partisan sycophants to go along with his selective clown-nose act, every step of the way, to provide him total immunity as he scrapes the bottom of the “comedy” barrel to portray the Right as racist. Blaming Rush (or lazily mocking my 2004 book on internment, profiling, and national security, as Colbert did on his show Monday night) deflects from the genuine offense taken by Park and other liberals at Colbert’s widespread dissemination of yellowface caricatures.
The Comedy Central political operatives need to make conservatives the demons so his audience forgets that liberal actress Rosie O’Donnell gratuitously mocked “ching-chong” accents on the mainstream ABC network show The View while her liberal co-hosts and audience yukked it up.
Or that Vice President Joe Biden mocked Indian accents in a 2012 jobs speech in New Hampshire and complained in 2008 on the campaign trail that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
Or that former secretary of state and leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton repeatedly has employed a degrading Southern accent to pander to black voters. (Google “I ain’t noways tired.”)
Or that Democrat Bob Beckel made fun of Louisiana GOP governor Bobby Jindal’s State of the Union response address by likening it to a “call-center ad in Mumbai.”
Or that mainstream Hollywood productions from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Mickey Rooney’s I. Y. Yunioshi) to Sixteen Candles (Long Duk Dong) to the sitcoms How I Met Your Mother (an entire show in yellowface) and 2 Broke Girls (Han Lee) have done more to disseminate and profit off cheap, vulgar, bucktoothed Asian stereotypes than Rush Limbaugh ever did.
It’s not the outrage that’s manufactured, but Colbert’s sanctimonious myth of left-wing purity and his phony indictment of conservatives as the predominant forces of intolerance in America.
But what do I know, Mr. Colbert? Me so stupid. You so funny.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies. |
