Some Fun, Sort Of

 

If you haven't read or heard anything about the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner on Saturday night, well, you missed a doozy.

 

It wasn't particularly funny, but it did have an underlying nasty edge to it. Jimmy Kimmel was MC, with performances by President Barack Obama and former NBC correspondent David Shuster, who got off the cutting remark of the night when he pointed out the Gingriches were attending, and noted "I guess their check cleared."

 

To his credit, Kimmel didn't fawn over Obama and had a zinger or two in his arsenal: "There's a term for Presidents like you, just not two terms."

 

It was Obama himself who had some of the best and most cutting lines of the night, but even there, you could tell he was playing it safe.

“Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals,” Obama said. Then a picture of real estate mogul Donald Trump appeared on the room’s television monitors. The president last year delivered a scathing roast of Trump, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination and claimed he had solved the “mystery” of Obama’s birth certificate.

Obama also took a shot at the Republican congressional leadership, whom he thanked “for taking time from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws” to attend the dinner.[...]

“[Mitt Romney and I] both have degrees from Harvard. I have one, he has two. What a snob.”

The crack drew a thumbs up from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who was in the audience. Santorum dropped out of the presidential primary campaign earlier this month. He had called Obama a snob for encouraging young Americans to attend college.

And there was a luscious, scrumptious video joke ("voke"?) of a faux-campaign commercial put together by Romney, using Air Force One...

It's not even May yet. We have six months more of this crap...sorry, Seamus...still to come, but it's nice it kicks off with a few laughs.