On Saturday, syndicated columnist, blogging pioneer and CRTV.com investigative reporter Michelle Malkin delivered an epic smackdown of the two-faced history of the White House Correspondents' Dinner. She also completely supported President Donald Trump's decision, announced in late February, not to attend the event.
The theme chosen for the dinner clearly vindicated Trump's decision.
To understand the theme's utter hypocrisy, let's review President Barack Obama's eight years in office, which saw unprecedented attacks on basic press freedoms. They included, but were certainly not limited to:
- More use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and reporters "than all previous administrations combined."
- The Justice Department's secret acquisition of call records "for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP (the Associated Press) and its journalists in April and May of 2012" (acknowledged in May 2013) involving over 100 reporters' work and personal phone numbers.
- A years-long effort to put then-New York Times reporter James Risen in jail for receiving and reporting leaked information.
- Its Federal Communications Commission's clear desire, which would likely have been carried out had Donald Trump not been elected, "to regulate websites based on political content," and, with the help of the Federal Elections Commission, "to regulate content online."
- Its record denial rate (77 percent as of March 2016) for Freedom of Information Act requests, while, as reported by the Associated Press, setting "a record for times federal employees told citizens, journalists and others that, despite searching, they couldn’t find a single page of files that were requested."
The Obama administration's unprecedented hostility toward press freedoms was certainly well-known during at least the previous three White House Correspondents' dinners. But of course, Obama had nothing to fear in attending them, because the Stockholm Syndrome press fervently supported his politics and ideology.
Thus, despite all the abuse, the WHCA waited until this year to decide that their event prominently needed the following theme — framed by the friendly Washington Post "as a triumphant refocus on what the dinner was always supposed to be about":
Spare me the sanctimony.
These people have suddenly decided that the First Amendment needs celebrating and defending because their guy isn't in charge, and, unlike other Republican presidents who have put up with the annual abuse at the event and usually endured the daily abuse the press calls "objective reporting" without comment, this President hasn't hesitated to call them out when he believes they are wrong.
With that background, here's Malkin's takedown:
Transcript (bolds are mine):
MICHELLE MALKIN: Hi, I'm Michelle Malkin for CRTV.
So what's the big deal about the White House Correspondents' Dinner?
Every year, a bunch of narcissist Beltway journalists invite a bunch of narcissist Hollywood celebrities to stroke each others' egos while they pretend to laugh at some narcissist liberal comedian's so-called "jokes" about the President.
Now if the President is a Democrat, they slobber all over each other and party into the wee hours of the morning at gated D.C. mansion soirees sponsored by the snobs at Vanity Fair. Then the "journalists" wake up with hangovers the next morning, and get back to work sucking up to power and passing off their gossip-mongering and left-wing editorializing as "objective journalism."
But if the President is a Republican, they grit their teeth and play nice for the cameras while the narcissist liberal comedian sneers passive-aggressively at the Commander-in-Chief. Then they bitch and moan and hunt for the next great Democratic hope to save them all.
But this year, Donald Trump is skipping out of the me-me-me media's pathetic egofest.
I say "Bravo." Let the narcissists throw tantrums in their sandbox and tell each other how indispensable they are to democracy.
President Trump's got a country to restore and run. (shaking finger) He don't got time for those news fakers and Hollywood haters.
As to how this year's dinner went, the Fox Business Network's Kennedy, aka Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, had the best line of the night. Referring to the featured comedian, Hasan Minhaj, she tweeted: "Waiting for @hasanminhaj to be funny."
Having seen what the press thinks were Minhaj's best lines, I suspect that Kennedy's wait never ended. Too bad she wasn't on the program.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
