Like a lot of people who stay up late at night, I watch the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. When he’s on a re-run week, I watch the less funny Dave Letterman. Every night without fail, these two comedians do a half-dozen jokes based on the premise that George W. Bush is a blithering idiot.  There are a couple of Bush impersonators who make the rounds of the late night shows with stupid things to say, making the president appear as a moron. Other jokes suggest that Dick Cheney is an evil madman. While none of this is true, there are plenty of people who believe it is. Lenin said, “A lie told often enough becomes truth.”  The late night funny guys are the only sources of news that some people ever get.

 It’s obvious that the president just doesn’t have it in the public speaking department, most of us don’t. But lacking in oratory skills and a Texas accent doesn’t add up to stupidity. There is a certain degree of ethnocentrism from denizens of the Northeast and the west coast who believe people from our part of the country are sub-human because we don’t speak the way they do. I’m inclined to see it the other way around.

I don’t mind comedians making jokes about the president or anyone else—within reason, but not if it’s run into the ground. There ought to be at least a little respect for the President of the United States. Guys like Leno and Letterman spend at least half their nightly monologues belittling the president. We’ve had seven years of this stuff. It got old after the first couple of weeks.

Despite an attempt by Dan Rather, using forged documents, to portray the President as someone who went AWOL while in the National Guard, the fact is that he signed on to the Air National Guard for 6 years and was trained as a jet fighter pilot. That takes someone who is smarter than the average bear. President Bush also has a Bachelor’s degree in History from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. While he’s no rocket scientist, his background isn’t exactly what one would expect from a dimwit.

 Making jokes about a sitting president has been around for a long time. Will Rogers was perhaps the first stand-up comedian to needle the president back in 1932. But Rogers’ style was considerably gentler than presidential jokes are today. In the days before Rogers, mentioning a president in an unflattering way simply wasn’t done.

 During the Clinton administration, the late night boys often made jokes about the president, but for the most part contained their jibes to Clinton’s philandering, which was true. They gave him a pass on his lying. While Clinton was being investigated, most of the jokes were about Ken Starr. While he was being impeached, they made jokes about the prosecutors.

 With the presidential campaign in full swing, they are spreading the jokes around among all the candidates. It will be interesting to see how they treat the incoming president next year.