Stephen Colbert is spending the week in Iraq, and his first episode Monday featured a guest appearance via satellite by President Obama, who seemed to only get a mildly enthusiastic reception from the troops in the audience. To be fair, a taped joke message from John McCain was also not overly well received. Perhaps the troops are just a little pissed about still being fucking over there. And Colbert's mission for bringing his show to Baghdad is to highlight the fact that we still have 130,000 troops fighting for us (for some reason) in Iraq, a fact that the media (including this site, I'm sad to say) has chosen to ignore since at least around the time of the economic meltdown last fall. The episode was hilarious as usual and included a "Stephen Strong: An Army of Me" featurette showing Colbert in "basic training" that was excellent. It also highlighted Colbert's commitment to the troops by having a general shave his precious hair into an army cut, something I didn't think Stephen would ever do. All in all, it was a great show and it should be a great week and you can see some of the episode below.
In very related news, Stephen was the "guest editor" this week for Newsweek, the first time in history they've given over control of an issue to an outsider. I've been a long-time subscriber to Newsweek, and they recently (2 weeks ago) underwent a major re-design of their magazine in the hopes of remaining relevant in the Internet age. I really like the changes they've made (although admittedly I always liked their old version) -- they have glossier paper, are focused more on serious issues (as opposed to some of the gossipy type stuff that has graced the pages before), and of course, they turned to Stephen Colbert to help them with an issue focused on Iraq and the fact that we have so many troops there outside the media's lights (and America's consciousness, I'm afraid to say). I haven't actually read the bulk of the magazine yet, but Stephen's column was as brilliantly funny as expected, as was his "Letters to the Editor", featuring all the letters he's sent to the magazine but never got published. But yeah, if you do want to see how the troops are doing and how the war is going, and maybe, why -- half a year after Obama's election -- we are still over there, take a look at the magazine's website and read. We should all (starting with me) realize that Obama's victory changed nothing on the ground in Iraq. Let's hope our brave men and women come home safe... very, very soon.
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