Stephen Colbert for Tom DeLay... Right?

One would think that after Stephen Colbert was lambasted by conservatives for daring to challenge George W. Bush with a brilliantly satirical stint at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, more conservatives would be clued into the fact that it's an act. Stephen Colbert is not a conservative. He has created the persona of a pompous ass who knows very little but thinks he knows it all (and has little need to learn anything more). Colbert the anchor is modeled primarily on Bill O'Reilly but also other figures such as Stone Phillips. Colbert plays it so straight, I can see some people being thrown initially, but no intelligent person with a sense of irony and humor can miss what he's doing for long.

However, in one of the weirdest, funniest moves of the year, Tom DeLay's Defense Fund has sent out an e-mail touting how documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who just finished a documentary on DeLay, "crashed and burned" when interviewed by Colbert. Delay's people also posted the video on their site. (I first saw this reported by Wonkette.)

The e-mail is of course slanted, but outright lies at least once in claiming that Delay brought "legal and Constitutional redistricting to Texas" since a group of lawyers (including several conservatives) at the Department of Justice unanimously disagreed. (If you missed it, the lawyers were put under a unusual gag order, they were overruled by senior officials and later banned from evaluating such matters in the future.) I suppose Delay could argue the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the matter, but come on, it's not like he's operating at that level of nuance.

However, the real joy is the video. You see, you've got conservatives thinking a liberal is a conservative because he mocks conservatives by adopting... oh, never mind.

A couple possibilities exist:

1) DeLay's people are really dumb.
2) DeLay's people think their donors are really dumb.
3) They sort of get Colbert's act, but watched the segment and thought, "That Colbert made some great points and sure showed Greenwald!"
4) Some bizarre combination of the above.

If nothing else, this incident is an immense compliment to Colbert's satirical powers, since evidentally he channels the Delay camp so perfectly. Either that, or they're really desperate... It's probably both. Really, all one can do is cry out:

The irony! The irony!