Forecasting This Year's WHCA Dinner, Plus
Where's Hunter Thompson, plus, Heil Tesla!
Forecasting This Year’s WHCA Dinner
The best ever White House Correspondents Association dinner was the 2006 one featuring Steven Colbert, back when he was still hosting The Colbert Report On Comedy Central. Whoever booked him may have confused the satirist with his character, as the roasting he gave both Bush and the assembled press was not well-received by either of those entities. Subsequent roasters have mostly been on the milquetoast side, although Michelle Wolf gave a fine accounting of herself in 2018.
This year’s dinner is scheduled for April 26, and one is pressed to imagine who the organization will pick. Perhaps they’ll go with a right-wing humorist. None of those are actually funny, but they’d be certain not to do more than gently rib Trump and his factotums and cronies. Certainly you wouldn’t be seeing any awkward gestures, or references to Whisky Pete Hegseth falling down drunk at a NATO afterparty.
The press have three months during which they can continue in vain to make themselves smaller targets of the president and the administration and the right in general, all of whom require the press to be targets and none of whom will do anything more gentle than viciously mock the press’s attempts to suck up.
But the press are doing it anyway. CNN’s Jake Tapper, a WHCA member, said this on inauguration day:
Trump fellating a microphone was evidently normal as well, as were all the other campaign and personal grotesqueries.
So the WHCA board are in a serious bind of their own making. They cannot embrace the reality of the Trump administration by hiring a reality-based satirist for the dinner without alienating even their liberal attendees—such as the ones who were shocked and appalled when Wolf skewered then-White House press secretary and now-Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders as an incorrigible liar—and further arousing the fascists.
Where’s Hunter Thompson?
Dead and in the ground, of course. The thing is, we don’t need gonzo journalists in this moment—just ones who accurately describe what’s happening, such as Hamilton Nolan, an excellent labor/politics reporter who you could do much worse than follow.
Reporting the grotesque as grotesque will look like and feel like gonzo journalism to people who shrink from embracing reality. Thompson sometimes had to stretch to reach grotesque, but exaggeration is unnecessary now. The president is completely corrupt; there’s nothing about him that isn’t corrupt. If he had a supernatural portrait secreted in his attic it would look like a pus-swollen cyst with a comb-over.
The same is true of his cabinet level appointees, the ones who require (and will acquire) Senate confirmation. Whisky Pete Hegseth is a toady and a drunk and unqualified to run anything other than his mouth; Pam Bondi is corrupt in the common sense, having requested and received a bribe to drop a Florida prosecution of Trump’s fraudulent “university,” and she’s as well a toady, a liar, and an insurrectionist; RFK Jr. has a brain afflicted by more than a decade of heroin abuse and, supposedly, a parasitic worm, things which both he and, in the heroin instance, scientists say wreak havoc on the brain, and so on.
(This is not to knock Junior’s addiction, which could happen to anyone but still has to be accounted for, but his hatred for some disciplines of science and his determination to inflict disastrous diseases upon tens of millions of people—that is utterly corrupt in the “shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight” sense we mentioned the other day.)
To write honestly about the administration and their supporters is to chronicle the grotesque in plain language. But our institutional press won’t do it. Which leads us to . . .
Heil Tesla!
Two activist organizations, one from the UK and one in Germany, where whether from sympathy or antipathy a whole lot of people know what’s what, collaborated to project this image onto a Tesla facility in the latter country:
The photo of the action was originally posted on the Led By Donkeys Instagram account but has now been scrubbed from that site. True to form, press outlets reporting on it described the Nazi salute as “controversial” (the shell of Newsweek) or having been “likened to a Nazi salute” (The Telegraph UK, in the most straightforward description we found in a story on the event.)
So the richest man in the world, and perhaps the most powerful one in some respects, is slinging shout-outs to the Nazis, as attested to by historians of the past fascist world and by enthusiasts of the current one, along with ordinary people who lived through it then and are living through it now, but the press, some of whom have already fully surrendered their right to honest reporting, cannot write about it without temporizing, at best, or even serving as apologists.
I have to praise PBS, not always the plainest of speakers, for their twitter post describing Musk’s fascist salute as “what appeared to be a fascist salute” rather than going the “some say” route. In response, fascist fellow traveler Marjorie Taylor Greene, describing herself with a straight face as the “Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE,” wants to haul the outfit’s bosses in front of her highness.
DOGE! The acronym for Department of Government Efficiency was made up to indulge Musk’s fondness for an old internet meme and the meme cybercoin it birthed, which is to say it was a joke even before MTG embraced it.
Fittingly, Musk has involved himself in inflating the alleged value of the coin on multiple occasions, while escaping a lawsuit accusing him of a classic securities pump-and-dump.
Nazi Nazi Nazi. Oi Oi Oi Oi.
Music
As never happens, I didn’t listen to anything while writing this. Blame any failings on that. The last thing I played was The Animals Retrospective from 2004.
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Much as I concur in your beating the conventional press about the face and ears, I have to continue to insist that the greater culprits in this shit show are the rubes and suckers also known as voters, without whom Trump ain't got nothin'. The ones that put him in office in our odd system do not, in my opinion and limited observation, read or watch the mainstream press. They suck up their information from God knows what social media, bar room rants, and evangelistic bullshit they get from their churches, clubs, lodges and revival meetings and, like Rudyard Kipling's Bandarlog of "The Jungle Book", chant to each other: "It's so, it's so, it must be so; we all say so, so it must be so." If they can breathe, they can vote and whoever the mouth breathers choose will probably win. As Churchill said, "The worst form of government except for all the rest." It seems likely that nothing will change until maybe, only maybe, they get battered sufficiently by the greedheads, to recognize who is doing it to them and find somebody else. It took the Depression to elect FDR. I shiver in anxiety to think what may be necessary to do it this time. Consider that even if the Big Macs finally get to Trump, there's Vance slouching towards Bethlehem to be born (with apologies to the soul of William Yeats).