Stephen Colbert (and God) laugh as the GOP “comes apart at the seams”
Big day for the Republican Party, what with another GOP senator openly denouncing Donald Trump and longtime conservative blowhard and “pile of pancake batter poured over last year’s scarecrow” Bill O’Reilly being outed (again) as a hypocritically sleazy (alleged) sex criminal. So it was also a big day for Late Show host Stephen Colbert, who rolled through a consistently harsh and funny monologue ripping into a healthy portion of those in the GOP who got us all into this Trump-sized mess. Sure, he had some help from above. Literally, as frequent Late Show contributor God (whose booming voice sounds suspiciously like Late Show stalwart Brian Stack) himself appeared once again among the clouds of the ornate Ed Sullivan Theater ceiling to respond to O’Reilly’s recent “O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?!” whining. You know, just because it was made public that the six-times-sued sexual harasser paid $32 million of his own money earlier this year to settle yet another claim that he’s a creepy old pervert who lives to lecture others about personal responsibility while blaming his inability to stop treating women like objects on everyone else on Earth. (And, as it turns out, in heaven.)
While confessing to his own iffy history with women (Lot’s wife alone cost Him an O’Reilly-sized $12 million payout—and those are B.C. bucks), Colbert’s personal deity nonetheless wasn’t having any of O’Reilly’s self-pitying savior-shaming. He was the one who made the scarecrow crack, causing Colbert to ask if he was roasting the now basement-broadcasting O’Reilly, to which Stack’s twinkly God replied ominously, “Oh, I won’t be the one roasting him, Stephen.”
Before the divine comedy intervention, though, Colbert had a devil of a time keeping a straight face as he examined how Tuesday’s surprising announcement by Arizona Senator Jeff Flake that he will not be seeking reelection was laid at Donald Trump’s doorstep like a rotten, racist squirrel carcass. Colbert, while appreciative of a Republican elected official breaking the wall of complicit silence over Trump’s habitual acts of, according to Flake, “despotism,” “anger,” and “resentment,” also asked when a Republican who isn’t on his way out the door will actually do the same. (Flake joins also not-running Republicans John McCain and Bob Corker in, as Colbert says, finding their balls only as they leave us to deal with the horror show they’ve been enabling all this time.) Responding to Flake’s rationale that he will have to answer to his children for what he did or didn’t do, Colbert suggested it might go something like this: “I waited until I was quitting until I pointed out my boss was a lunatic, now eat your radioactive dog meat.” God help us.