Oh, gawwwwddddd.... this is our least favorite time of year. Why? Because it's the season of the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which always seems to re-loom way too quickly, and which will be held on Saturday night.
We cats will be elsewhere, and you can bet on it. We hate, hate, hate this stupid event, which you probably know because we bitch about it annually.
Two recent articles in The Washington Post have reminded us why we so loathe the WHCD. First was this little gem about how Lally Weymouth, who as Katharine Graham's daughter should have known better, invited Donald Trump to be a guest at the Post's table in 2011.
Did President Obama memorably skewer Trump that year? You betcha. But we still cringe at the thought of a major newspaper giving cover to a bigoted birther, which is essentially what Weymouth did. Sorry, Lally, but there's a real disgusting conflict there, and it makes us want to hack up a hairball.
The other was this gushy item in the Post's Style section about the giant faux "yearbook" that the Independent Journal Review (whoever the hell they are) has created as the most-sought-after WHCD 2016 party favor.
Please — can somebody tell us exactly when being a reporter became all about the reporter and not about the story? Because this is not how we've understood the nature of journalism, and we think that the reporters who toil anonymously (and put their lives in danger doing it) in war zones and other unpleasant places must find this Beltway narcissism sickening. We certainly do.
Do we want to see President Obama's last comedy schtick? Well, sure, but that's what C-SPAN is for. In the meantime, we dump our dirty litter boxes in the lap of whoever had the idea to make the WHCD a combination of the Oscars, the 1972 Republican National Convention and a Vanity Fair after-party. It reinforces all the negatives that mainstream America feels about Washington politics and journalism, and it makes us ill. We cats HISS.
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