EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH WASHINGTON: The White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Everyone knows the White House Correspondents Association dinner is broken. What started off decades ago as a stately formal celebration of the best of presidential reporting has morphed into a four-day orgy of everything people outside the Beltway hate about life inside the Beltway—now it’s not just one night of clubby backslapping, carousing and drinking between the press and the powerful, it’s four full days of signature cocktails and inside jokes that just underscore how out of step the Washington elite is with the rest of the country. It’s not us (journalists) versus them (government officials); it’s us (Washington) versus them (the rest of America).”

It’s no surprise to anyone who has seen The Hunger Games.

Jay Rosen writes: “True! And yet they keep doing it. Why?” Contra Rosen’s predictable take, it’s not Bush’s fault. Thronesniffers gotta throne-sniff. And this is how these people get revenge for not receiving the adulation they think they deserved in High School.

Related: When Washington fiddled while Baltimore burned. “So, where were the cable networks on Saturday night as Baltimore was rocked by violence? Telling their viewers to go to Twitter if they wanted to read the news. . . . That editorial instinct, one shared by virtually every media outlet, reflects a toxic level of self-veneration and an ugly disdain for the public this institution supposedly serves.”