All the President's Groupies

Richard Pollock on yesterday’s White House correspondent’s dinner:

This morning Politico’s Mike Allen sent out an email saying SNL comedian Seth Meyers’ cutting speech about The Donald at the dinner bummed out both Trump and the entire WaPo table of reporters and guests. Allen reports:

“TRUMP sat stone-faced at the WashPost table at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as Seth Meyers of “Saturday Night Live” ripped him brutally. Definitely laughing at him, not with him. Was so awkward that some folks at his table stopped laughing and applauding.”

WaPo’s Dana Milbank – who we assumed sat at one of his paper’s tables — mused that all these Washington reporters hobnobbing with the rich and powerful could send the wrong message. As he also wrote in this morning’s paper: “Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover.”

Nahh, they figured that out long ago. Likely even before the WaPo completely shed its professional detachment, particularly when it served as an information clearing house for the president’s self-described “non-official campaign” staffers. Or perhaps when they heard the applause from WaPo HQ when Obama dropped by shortly before taking office.

Or perhaps when they read this quote from 2005:

“Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions,” an editor working for the Washington Post’s Sunday “Book World” section charged in a contribution to a daily internal critique of the newspaper quoted by Howard Kurtz on Monday. Marie Arana disclosed that “if you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I’ve been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.”

I used to be flabbergasted, now I’m merely just amused.

Related: More on JournoList HQ the Washington Post, who invited Donald Trump to be the president’s punching bag:

Trump had to be smirking at the attention, but it’s a pathetic commentary that the allegedly independent White House Press Corps served as a vehicle for an incumbent President to bash his most vocal challenger. I mean, I know that they’re a bunch of partisan sycophants, but do they have to be so obvious about it?

Oh, I suspect that last night will be a paragon of subtlety compared to how deeply the press will once again show their love for Obama in the next year and a half.