Complaining about insulting humor at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is like complaining about the presence of casseroles at a potluck dinner. And yet:
Oh no, Trump hurls insults. This is apparently different than just saying them, but we don’t speak fluent middle school girl. Anyway, this theme is everywhere, and it’s pathetic.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a forum for insulting humor. Always. The president makes fun of journalists, and journalists or their hired comedian make fun of the president. This is normal, predictable, and completely expected. Ronald Reagan said that layoffs at ABC News were getting so ugly that they had laid off “three hair stylists,” a joke about journalists being shallow talking hairdos who mostly care about appearances. Barack Obama said that he loved Spotlight, a movie about the importance of investigative journalism and media truth-seeking in America, the “best fantasy film since Star Wars.” No one cared. No one should have cared.
It also runs the other way.
The dimwitted comedian Wanda Sykes compared Rush Limbaugh to Osama bin Laden in 2009 and joked about her hope that he would get sick and die: “I hope his kidneys fail, how about that?” Go back up to The New York Times headline at the top: “Trump hurls insults.” Uglier than “I hope his kidneys fail,” or somewhat less ugly?
Everyone whining about Trump’s horrible insults at the stupid dinner knows that his jokes fell well inside the boundaries of normal. All the braindead reflex-whiners know that one of the most famous victims of the invariable and highly predictable nastiness that always comes with the idiotic White House Correspondents’ Dinner was Trump himself.
Yet still they whine, faking the tedious controversy of the day, which is their actual profession. Some dolls wet their diaper when you pull their string, and some dolls pretend to be angry at Donald Trump. Both are in danger of a career in journalism.
Today as always, the declaration of controversy precedes the evidence. A bunch of dim bulbs make a living by waking up every morning and saying that whatever Trump did yesterday was an outrage, so whatever Trump did yesterday has to be an outrage, even when it’s invariably not an outrage. The alternative to this mindless, soulless, completely empty ritual chanting would be for Jim Acosta or Brian Stelter or anyone at The New York Times to have a real job or an original thought, neither of which is possible.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is the most meaningless event in American political life, ranking in importance somewhere below the sight of a monkey scratching its own armpits. It sucks, and we should all give up on it.
With that said, we owe the person who wrote this joke as many drinks as he or she wishes to consume.
We now return to ignoring the whole thing.
