Most comedic acts at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner are unfunny, but last night’s performance by someone named Michelle Wolf set a new standard by being both loathsome and unfunny (I wasn’t there, by the way, and haven’t gone in years). Here’s the video of her vicious riff on Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Dan makes the partisan hypocrisy point here:
White House Correspondents' Dinner has changed a lot since Obama was president & it was mainly a venue for mocking the president's critics.
I wonder why that changed.
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) April 29, 2018
And here:
Core problem w/ #WHCD & Wolf comedy routine is not that it was cruel (it was) or unfunny (it was) or disrespectful to women (it was), but that it revealed yet again that the agenda-setting national political media holds an annual event reveling in angry Democratic partisanship.
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) April 29, 2018
Tim Alberta notes how discrediting this is:
Every caricature thrust upon the national press—that we are culturally elitist, professionally incestuous, socioeconomically detached and ideologically biased—is confirmed by this trainwreck of an event.
Journalists, the joke’s on us.
The WHCD is broken. Fix it or end it.
— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) April 29, 2018
And Maggie Haberman rightly praises Sanders for enduring something she never should have been subjected to:
That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 29, 2018
Some in the press whine about Trump skipping these dinners. Last night showed he is right to do so, and in the future everyone at the White House should as well.