Sykes Goes Too Far, New York Times Goes Farther

The White House Correspondents Dinner was Saturday night, and it is one of Washington's more bizarre affairs. One wag put it as “a dinner at which the sitting president pretends to like the White House Press Corps, and vice versa.” However, the celebrities were eight deep, unlike the Bush years, and the challenge for the speakers is to interrupt conversations among the likes Warren Buffet, George Clooney and Christopher Hitchens. This year, comedian Wanda Sykes provided the comic relief, and in two places, she went too far to keep the attention of the audience. Nevertheless, her behavior was far superior to that of the New York Times.

After dinner (which incidentally included no dessert – the money for which was donated to a charity), President Obama spoke for a few minutes, delivering stand-up that wasn't bad. By the same token, he should keep his day job. He spoke of a new friend he had brought to the White House, a warm, fuzzy lovable guy who every so often goes off on his own and who needs to be kept on a short leash, “but enough about Joe Biden.” And he mentioned GOP Chairman Michael Steele. “Michael Steele's in the house. Or as he would say in the hizzy. 'Sup?” George Will has more urban street credibility than Michael Steele.

Then, Ms. Sykes came on, and for her fans (and that includes this journal), the question was whether she would use her famously blue language in front of the president. She didn't. In fact, she performed brilliantly. However, she made two “jokes” that went too far. The first was about Rush Limbaugh, as evil a gas bag as ever lived and that includes Nazi hate-monger Julius Streicher. She said, “Maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight." Mr. Limbaugh's prescription drug problem isn't really fair game. Attack the man for his ignorance, his ideology and his low signal to noise ratio all one wants, but not for being an upper crust junkie.

The second “joke” was about Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin, who canceled at the last minute to deal with floods in her state (that was the official pretext anyway). Of her, Ms. Sykes said that she pulled out at the last minute, which isn't really how one practices abstinence. That would have been fine except that Ms. Palin's teenage daughter just had a child out of wedlock. The remark brought young Bristol Palin, who hasn't reached 20 yet, into the spotlight for ridicule. The Governor is a fair target, and her husband, the self-promoting First Dude Todd, is as well. However, Bristol Palin didn't ask to be a pubic figure, and she deserves a bit of privacy.

Despite those two rather unfortunate remarks, the behavior of the New York Times at the affair was even worse. For the second year in a row, the alleged paper of record boycotted the event. The reason given was and is that the dinner creates too cozy a relationship between the administration and the press. This is both ignorant and hypocritical. In the first place, sitting down to dinner, telling jokes and enjoying a few hours of bonhomie doesn't put anyone in another's pocket. Churchill at Yalta was more than cordial to Stalin. Does anyone believe that the man who gave the Iron Curtain speech went soft on communism because of some vodka over dinner?

Worse, the New York Times more than any other news organization save Fox is responsible for the war in Iraq because it was so deeply enmeshed with the Bush administration. The horribly bad journalism of Judith Miller and her editors led to the American public's acceptance of the war of aggression. For this rag to decide that spending an evening dining with the president was wrong when it went to bed with the Pentagon is ridiculous. Here's an idea – resurrect the Rocky Mountain News and close the New York Times. At least, the Denver paper had comics.

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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