Catching up with shows my beloved TiVo has recently grabbed for me, I just watched an episode of The Colbert Report from a few nights ago. It was the one on which the Lord of Truthiness talked with the departed and disgraced FEMA director, Michael Brown. Mr. Brown has been on kind of a redemption tour lately, coasting on some revelations that perhaps he wasn't quite as incompetent and unqualified as was once reported. He's trying to turn that into the belief that he was competent and qualified…and I don't think we're ready to go quite that far with it. Still, the idea that he was the scapegoat for a lot of folks' screw-ups is not without merit.
The great thing about Colbert's interviews is that it's impossible for a guest to be prepared for them. (It's also impossible for the interviewee to be the funny one, as some haven't seemed to realize.) If you had a cause to advance and you went on with Wolf Blitzer or Larry King or Joe Scarborough or just about anyone this side of Keith Olbermann, you could write out a list of 25 questions in advance, prepare responses for each and you'd be pretty well covered. Most interrogators wouldn't get past the five most obvious. Colbert knocks everyone off-script and the more they try to get back on, the worse they do. In the process, some real answers sometimes slip through the cracks.
Here's a link to an online video of Colbert interviewing Michael Brown. It's funny but it's also a more substantive interview than I've seen anyone else do with the guy. Around seven minutes.