Colbert bashing

Truly, up is down in Richard Cohen's twisted world. Glenn Greenwald points us toward "one of the dumbest and yet most illustrative paragraphs I've read in awhile, courtesy of the incomparably obsolete relic, Richard Cohen, in his column in today's The Washington Post". Apparently, Cohen thinks that Colbert was rude and a bully for speaking truthiness to power.

Greenwald responds:

What an odd set of values a large portion of this country has adopted. Sending one's fellow citizens to fight in a distant war is somehow the hallmark of strength and courage. But standing up a few feet away from the President of the United States, and delivering very substantive and stinging criticism while knowing that nobody in the room would support you, is an act of uncouth rudeness, even cowardice. The national media is, with few exception, beyond salvation.

[...]

Richard Cohen's claim -- echoed by many others -- that there was nothing courageous about Stephen Colbert's criticisms of the President should be contrasted with the still-staggering admission of Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that she, along with her media colleagues, were afraid -- afraid -- to ask the President questions about the justifications for our invasion of Iraq

[...]

The "war climate" which the administration worked very hard to maintain meant that most national journalists were petrified of aggressively challenging the Commander-in-Chief during this "time of war" because of fears that they would be pelted with all sorts of accusations from the President's followers (as well as because many of them were marching in lockstep with the President's worldview). Deep down, they know they failed miserably in their journalistic function. Despite that -- really, because of that -- they hate Stephen Colbert for doing what they were supposed to do but were so blatantly unwilling and afraid to do, and so they have to smear his act of courage by tossing up their noses and characterizing it as some very offensive breach of etiquette, even depicting his criticissm of the President as being cowardly. [emphasis is mine --bill]

Contrasting Colbert's criticisms voiced directly to the President, with Bumiller's fear-driven posture of being "very deferential" to the President because it's so very "frightening" to question the Leader, is there really any doubt as to which approach is more consistent with what the Founders intended when they guaranteed a free press in order to ensure an adversarial watchdog over the Government?