The Social Event of the Season

Maybe it's just me, but I've long considered the White House Correspondents Dinner to be a gigantic middle finger to the rest of the country. It's a masturbatory exercise in which various politicians and the court jesters who purport to be journalists chronicling their great deeds pretend to stage a Friar's Club roast of one another.

Actually, it's not just me. Tom Brokaw, of all people, agrees:

“One of the reasons that I wanted to raise it on ‘Meet the Press’ — and I told [host] David [Gregory] beforehand, ‘I’m going to look for an opportunity to do that,’ is that we were at a point in Washington where the country had just kind of shut down on what was going on within the Beltway,” Brokaw told POLITICO.

“They were making their own decisions in their own states, in their own communities, and the congressional ratings were plummeting,” he added. “The press corps wasn’t doing very well, either. And I thought, ‘This is one of the issues that we have to address. What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country? Are we doing their business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles?’ And what comes through the screen on C-SPAN that night is the latter, and not the former.”

So Brokaw's concern is that the event erodes the credibility of the media. That's not it, actually. They really don't have much credibility and they don't much care what any of us think, a point Allahpundit drives home quite nicely:

There are lots and lots and lots of reasons to distrust and dislike the media, especially if you’re a conservative, but I’d bet not one in 100 people surveyed at random would name the WHCD as one of them. Not five in 100 would even know what the WHCD is. To treat this as some sort of problem is, however inadvertently, to minimize their real sins. No one would care about them spending an evening posing for pictures with the “Duck Dynasty” guys if they didn’t need to be browbeaten into covering the Gosnell trial. Have a ball tonight, water-carriers.

Yep. From time to time a little truth comes out, as in this remark President Obama made last night:

Some of my former advisors have switched over to the dark side. For example, David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod. (Laughter.)

And then there was this little tribute to a local politician:

I am not giving up. In fact, I’m taking my charm offensive on the road -- a Texas barbeque with Ted Cruz, a Kentucky bluegrass concert with Rand Paul, and a book-burning with Michele Bachmann. (Laughter and applause.)

Bachmann isn't my favorite politician, either, but that's an astonishingly crappy thing to say about someone. Even Jim Graves winced at that one, I would imagine.