Stephen Colbert's show is really, really good at selling books (so is Jon Stewart's) which explains why some authors go on, knowing they may well be made to look at least semi-foolish. Last week, Dr. Colbert had on Laura Ingraham, who has the best-selling non-fiction book on the New York Times list, The Obama Diaries. The book is a batch of phony diary entires by Barack (and Michelle and Joe Biden and others) that allegedly fell mysteriously into the custody of Ms. Ingraham and if the Times were really a left-wing — or even impartial — newspaper, they'd have it in the fiction category where it rightly belongs.
If the excerpts I've read are typical, it's a pretty tawdry work, catering to every myth that Obama's opponents want to spread about him. It's one of the frustrations of politics that so much of it is how facile someone is at "defining" (i.e., selling a phony portrait of) the opposition. Democrats do it too but Republicans are better at it. They know how to convince a sizeable portion of the U.S. that they shouldn't vote for Michael Dukakis because he likes to let black rapists out of prison, they shouldn't vote for Al Gore because he thinks he invented the Internet and they shouldn't vote for John Kerry because he really didn't earn those medals. It didn't work well enough against Clinton though and it hasn't been fatal (so far) for Obama…but it's still annoying. If those men were hammered for things they actually said or did, it would be a different matter.
And yes, note I said Democrats do it, too. But I don't think the Obama folks lied about McCain nearly as much as McCain lied about Obama. Or at least they didn't do as good a job of it. (Actually, I think McCain self-destructed by hugging Bush, pandering to the Palin crowd and just looking like he couldn't remember what he'd said the day before.)
Anyway, Ingraham's out flogging her book that says that Obama is everything Sean Hannity says he is and enough people want to hear this to make it a best-seller. She apparently thought the Colbert Bump would be so valuable it would be worth the risk of going on his show. She also apparently thought that her old connection to Stephen via Dartmouth would protect her. She leads off with it to try and get on his good side and then later, when he's making her look pretty damn bad, she brings it up again to attempt a change of subject. Here's Stephen Colbert being very funny at the expense of his guest. And probably helping her sell even more books…
