As Stephen Colbert’s late-night show would down, the Media Research Center continued to play comedy cop. Alex Christy groused that Colbert did an interview with former President Obama in a May 6 post:
As CBS’s The Late Show prepares to wind down operations in less than three weeks, host Stephen Colbert traveled to Chicago for a lengthy interview with former President Barack Obama to hype the opening of his presidential library and museum. Amid a flurry of other softballs, Colbert would suggest that in contrast to President Trump, Obama was a pillar of executive restraint, and recall the old liberal idea that the worst thing Obama ever did was tear a tan suit.
One softball Colbert lobbed was, “Fifty to 100 years from now, when somebody comes to this center, what do you want them to take away from the experience? What do you want them to learn about you and the legacy of your administration?”
[…]Colbert then moved on, “There’s often a conversation about the restriction or the need to restrict certain executive powers. I might have asked you this when you were running for president back in the day. Like, is there any power that President Bush has taken that you would say, ‘No, I don’t want that power,’ because it keeps accumulating. Now that you’re no longer in office, what powers do you believe the president should not have?”
The man who was always bragging about his pen and phone and threatening, “If Congress doesn’t act, I will,” replied, “There are a couple that I followed even though they were law. And I want us — we’re going to have to do some work to return to this basic norm, and we probably now have to codify it. The White House shouldn’t be able to direct the attorney general to go around prosecuting whoever the president wants prosecuted.”
He also claimed, “The idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer. It’s not the president’s consigliere.”
What about a wingman? Again, any reference to the IRS and Tea Party was conveniently ignored as Obama rolled on, “There’s a bunch of stuff that, you know, we can overcome. We can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system. The awesome power of the state. You can’t have a situation where whoever is in charge starts using that to go after their political enemies or reward their friends, right?… I would consult with Eric Holder, with my attorney general, all the time, around broad policy issues, but that’s different than who do you charge, what case do you bring?”
When current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth talks about woke-ism in the military, the Obama era stands out. Nevertheless, Obama added, “The second thing is the military. Don’t politicize our military. As president, you are commander-in-chief. You are responsible for directing our military. But there had been a whole series of norms that were in place to ensure that you weren’t trying to make that military loyal to you as opposed to the constitution and the people of the United States. We’re going to have to find mechanisms to restore that.”
Christy continued his fit of Obama derangement:
Later, the duo went on a tour of the museum, and Colbert sarcastically wondered, “Is there a wing dedicated to greatest blunders? Is the tan suit here? I’m asking if the tan suit is here.”
of Obama derangement:After Obama declared that “I own that suit proudly,” Colbert pulled out a photo and wondered, “We have this if you want to put it on display someplace. A shattered nation looked up and saw that. When you look back at the tan suit, what occurs to you?”
Obama simply wondered, “Fly”
The real question is why do Colbert and media types insist that the tan suit was the most controversial thing Obama ever did?
Because the MRC and its fellow right-wing travelers freaked out so much about it at the time? Christy didn’t mention that part.
Curtis Houck further complained about this interview:
The still far-left CBS Mornings began Wednesday with five minutes of fawning over soon-to-be-ex-colleague Stephen Colbert teaming up for Tuesday’s Late Show with former President Barack Obama ahead of the latter’s Presidential Center to attack President Trump through a series of serious projections about norms.
In other words, they treated water being wet as breaking news.
[…]Sadly, CBS gave senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang the task of dressing up this blatant corporate synergy and partisan pandering as legitimate news.
“[H]e had plenty to say about the presidency and how the Oval Office has changed since he was in charge…During a taped interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Colbert asked former President Barack Obama about the expanding powers of the executive branch, and what powers he believes whoever is the president should not have,” Jiang stated in part.
[…]The show shamelessly had a second segment about this interview with chief Washington analyst Robert Costa, who had the gall to tell featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers that former presidents “don’t always want to weigh in on current affairs,” but Obama chose to given the opening of this so-called “Presidential Center”[.]
Houck didn’t explain why he dismissed Obama’s presidential center as “so-called,” as if he was also trying to deny that Obama was, in fact, president. Instead, he whined:
First, Obama has made endorsements in nearly every election since leaving office. Secondly, he spent months appearing in ads for the Virginia Democrat move to gerrymander the state from a six Democrat-five Republican map to 10 Democrats to one Republican.
And finally, this is not a library, thus breaking a norm set by every presidential center going back to Herbert Hoover.
Houck failed to explain why a library musts be part of a presidential center and be the only part that matters..