The Irrelevance of the Washington Press Corps

Apparently, the organizers of the White House Correspondents Association Dinner are the only ones who remembered that Rich Little is still alive.

After a White House Correspondents Dinner marred by a speech that was actually, tragically funny, the WHCA has taken steps to ensure that never again will the C-SPAN-watching public accidentally crack a smile. This year’s dinner guest of honor: Rich Little.

Yeah, the impressionist known for his humorous takes on Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Johnny Carson, and hopefully some people who aren’t dead.

Well, at least I'll have a free Saturday night in February.

Let's think about this, shall we? Last year, the WHCA Dinner featured a brilliant bit of comic theater from Stephen Colbert, that brought more attention to that particular event than practically any other of the last 40 years. If the press corps picked a similarly iconoclastic figure, someone who would garner publicity in a "what do you think he'll say" kind of way, the country would be anticipating it for weeks. But instead, the reaction from a press corps who can't get the joke, can't see the humor in themselves, can't have someone come in and upset their hermetically sealed cocktail party, is to pick up Rich Little from the retirement home and bring him and his Reagan jokes out.

Will there be a live version of "Match Game" to go along with it?

More than anything, this shows how vapid, how out of touch, how completely irrelevant the DC media has become. And this dinner will return to its irrelevant place among DC social events, a shadow play where everybody forgets about the necessary adversarial stance between the press and the government, where the press forgets that they're advocates for the people, and everybody laughs at one another and has a grand old time. Shockingly, it didn't take the President asking "those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere" for the press corps to be offended. It took Stephen Colbert telling them who they were, calling the whole dinner and the whole way Washington works on the carpet.

And as a result, they go and get Rich Little. I hope Richard Cohen likes Jimmy Stewart impressions. Actually, I'm sure he does.