In the midst of his spot-on parody of Palin’s stream-of consciousness endorsement of Donald Trump, Colbert dropped in some lines from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” This supports the argument we made yesterday that Palin is a poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Ginsberg.
Colbert’s parody was delightful for other reasons as well. He’s a gifted mimic who loves inhabiting the characters he mocks. After a self-administered tazering to destroy his sense of sentence structure, Colbert launched into a perfect imitation of Palin’s bebop cadence: “Greetings and welcomes to all across America, you go-getters and toe-tappers, you motor-city madmen...”