NEW YORK (WWJ) – Former General Motors Vice Chair Bob Lutz showed the world the meaning of the expression “Once a Marine, Always a Marine.”

The 80-year-old Lutz wowed viewers of the “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, when he beat host Stephen Colbert in a push-up contest.

(Check out the video here).

Lutz also defended the Chevrolet Volt and the 2009 aid to GM and Chrysler.

“I’m a conservative pragmatist, and any country in the world would step in with loans for its automobile industry,” Lutz said. He said without the auto aid, the nation would have seen an “economic Armageddon.”

Lutz has generally taken conservative positions on major issues, including calling global warming a “crock of s***” and jokingly describing his own politics as “slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.”

However Lutz has recently criticized conservative talk show hosts who have slammed the auto bailout and called the Chevy Volt an “Obama-mobile.”

The Volt, Lutz has pointed out, was conceived by General Motors more than two years before Mr. Obama took office. On the Colbert Report, Lutz said Volt sales were coming back. Pointing to a record sales performance in March, Lutz predicted GM would sell about three thousand Volts a month going forward.

He also pointed out that the Chevrolet Volt is the first American designed and built car to be named European Car of the Year.

“They have an enhanced sense of their own infallibility when it comes to automobiles.”

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