Who can step into Little Russ' big shoes? This week, NBC announced that Tom Brokaw will fill in for former host Tim Russert on the $60-million-a year-franchise "Meet the Press" -- but only temporarily.

"The plan is for me to be in place until they can find somebody who can take it over on a permanent basis," Brokaw said.

Who could that someone be? Like most conservatives, I was a skeptic when NBC News announced a Democrat political operative named Tim Russert was stepping over into the supposedly neutral journalism slot; like most Americans, I became a big fan.

Which is why I'm urging NBC to go outside the journalism box a second time for the rare guy who can continue the Russert tradition of fair, penetrating and effective decency: Stephen Colbert, anyone?

I know, I know. You're saying: "He's a comic actor, not a journalist." Tim Russert was a political operative, not a journalist.

But Stephen Colbert, the man who coined the word "truthiness," can (like Russert) pierce through the multiple veils of doublespeak to get politicians on both sides of the aisle to tell us the truth about themselves, whether they want to or not.

For a another thing, Colbert is brilliant, likable, funny and remarkably evenhanded in skewering sacred cows.

His liberal fan base in the mainstream media, who think of him as a doctrinaire liberal, don't know this. (An NPR reporter expressed the view recently that most of Colbert's fans would be surprised to know he's a Mass-going Catholic who's married with three kids, including a son named after Pope John Paul II.)

What his liberal fans also don't realize is that conservatives love him, too.

"The Colbert Report" rules both sides of the aisle, because in a twisted, brilliant technical performance -- I still can't figure out how he pulls it off -- Colbert manages at precisely the same moment he is making fun of conservatism to simultaneously lampoon what liberals imagine conservatives are like.

Colbert is, like Russert, one of those rare figures who swing both ways in a deeply divided and divisive political culture. Continued...