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A recent study conducted by researchers at the Ohio State University has proven something I’ve wondered for years: Conservatives think Stephen Colbert is for real.

This issue cropped up a few years back when Stephen Colbert was asked to speak at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, where he proceeded to tear the President apart with his typical hyper-rhetorical satire while he was standing just a few feet away. I thought it seemed very un-Bush-like to allow dissent in that close of a proximity to him, so I wondered if going in, did Bush and the event planners really think Colbert was on their side?

Well, now science says yes:

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Conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.

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They think he’s being serious. I’ve seen Republican’s cluelessness in action before, but this has to be a new all-time record. I mean look at the picture I’ve used for this post! It should be a mural you’d see in Rush Limbaugh’s personal hell, and they’re actually taking him at face value?

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At yesterday's Law School graduation ceremony, Gordon Smith got a chance to talk to Rep. Tammy Baldwin about -- well, what would you talk to her about? -- Stephen Colbert:

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It turns out that she's a fan of Stephen Colbert, too. She asked whether I thought he was, at heart, a liberal or conservative. (Apparently, this is a matter of dispute among members of Congress.) I told her that I assumed he was a liberal, but she said that the congressman who claims to know Colbert best is convinced that he is a conservative.

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Yeesh, are our representatives that dumb?

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And then when I got to "The Daily Show," they asked me to have a political opinion--or rather Jon did. When Craig was there, it wasn't so political. Jon asked me to have a political opinion, and it turned out that I had one, but I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices.

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A nice thing about Colbert is that he cared first about being funny and only explored his political ideas because it was part of the comic role he had taken. The passion was for comedy, not politics. That means he's not a natural politico. (I like people like that; I identify with them.) Forced to take a political position, he was surprised by how liberal he was.

Now, you could say, but the environment of "The Daily Show" is so liberal that perhaps an unpolitical person would falsely "discover" that he was a big liberal. Creating his own show, he embodied himself in a ridiculous conservative character. But why did he do that? Our Congressmen and -women are wondering! Maybe at some point, he saw that he was only a chameleon on "The Daily Show" and longed to express conservative opinions, so he created the "Colbert Report" character so he could say all those things and still not lose all his liberal friends.

Sorry, that's the best I can do in an effort to absolve our representatives of the charge of cluelessness.

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