The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is going to suck this year
There was once a time, not so long ago, when The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the hottest ticket in D.C. The annual event slowly grew from its humble beginnings of several dozen men from the press having dinner with a few top-level White House aides into the sprawling, Hollywood-to-Washington circle-jerk that has provided a reliable source of spectacle and gossip for the past couple decades. When Obama came to power, however, the event practically exploded in a supernova of exclusivity, with celebrities wanting to pack a drafty banquet hall in order to see the cool-dad president launch bon mots with the same frequency as his deadly drone attacks in foreign countries. Also, there was the added benefit for those at home (the event is broadcast on C-SPAN) of watching great comedians excoriate the mainstream press with withering put-downs—even funnier to those at home when cameras would cut to the stone-faced journalists, who obviously all have a great sense of humor about themselves.
