I thought she got off easy too. 

He seemed to be going out of his way to make sure she didn’t come off too nuts, when with normal guests, he works to make them seem odder than they really are.

I got the impression he thought her insanity was way out there for everyone to see and he didn’t need to do much to showcase it. Or maybe he was just, for the first time, absolutely flummoxed.

Or maybe he was just, for the first time, absolutely flummoxed.

I’ve noticed he has a much harder time running his shtick w/ wingnut guests than liberals.

My wife and I too felt the same way and discussed this last night after we saw it.  Although we found the segments funny and we understand how Colbert operates, we still felt that even giving a traitorous nutbag like Orly a TV forum to appear on is wrong. 

We do feel that he went easy on her, but that of course, she still demonstrated the crazy on her own and it is possible that putting to light her public statement on her SSN theories will show more people how nutty she is and maybe even her definitive statement towards the end about how NOTHING will satisfy her that BO is legit as president will finally put the nail in the coffin of those who seem “sympathetic” to the birther cause and keep asking “why not just show more, respond to them, etc to make this go away”.

She has clearly demonstrated that NOTHING will stop birther madness and hopefully others will finally start to inoculate themselves from this diseased and deranged movement.

Colbert’s role is to mock conservative commentators, so by playing it straight with ORLY, he thereby mocking her.  95% of Colbert’s audience gets this, and the other 5% are too stupid to know any better.  It’s too bad some of that minority currently serves in congress.

Sometimes his scalpel slices so fine it’s hard to see. He par*tic*ularly liked the part about digging up Obama’s father—high five! And the adorably ditsy monster high-fived him.

If you haven’t been following this and heard her start babbling about the social security number and how Obama is 195 years old (the Connecticut vampire!) you would realize then, if not before, that she is pretty much off her rocker.

@marindenver—Exactly. No one who tuned in last night (other than Orly’s fans) was expecting her to be anything but a total brain-case, and Colbert pulled exactly the right money lines to make that point in the most efficient manner possible. Once she invoked Hitler and calmly asserted that Obama is 119 years old, it was over. After that, Colbert played the part of the bemused nice guy gently humoring an obvious lunatic. That she was attractive, smiling, dressed as an upscale escort and earnestly claiming the most ridiculous things in the voice of a Yiddish Vaudeville comic only underscored her surreal, Mork-like unawareness of her own freakishness.

The most effective way to discredit her would have been to sit back and simply let her proceed, Queeg-like, to tick through her breathless recitation of obscure trivia about Indonesian passport stamps, inheritance of citizenship through the male bloodline, the placement of registration marks on a Selective Service form, de Vattel, the Magna Carta, flight times from Kenya to Honolulu in 1961, the meaning of pro hoc vice and the telltale shifting of pixels in an altered JPG image. But that would have been the Andy Kaufmann approach—not the Colbert style—and really painful, unfunny TV.

She’s insane, but she wasn’t saying he was literally 119 years old. She was saying that he was using a fake SSN—one from someone long dead (she never mentions how she might know this of course).