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White House Correspondents Dinner: Popinjays on Parade Philip V. Brennan Watching the spectacle of the so very elite media displaying their vastly inflated egos at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner caused me to say a prayer for Tony Snow, who has voluntarily surrendered himself to the excruciating ordeal of dealing with these worthless poseurs day in and day out for the next 1,000 days of the Bush administration.
Think about it, this decent, modest, good man willingly throwing himself into a pit of hissing serpents inflamed with the notion that they are the guardians of all that is good and holy and, because of their superiority above the average run of mankind, charged with the duty of defending the nation against the depredations of a caste of slovenly, ignorant politicians bent on deceiving the stupid American people. Surely he must be a victim of a tragic martyr complex.
Each year, this annual event, this parade of popinjays, becomes more like an Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, with celebrities of stage and screen, sports figures, and hosts of people famous for being famous mingling with the nation's self-appointed media elite. C-SPAN even aped the Oscar spectacle by screening the arrival of some of the guests, and, just as in Tinseltown, a line of groupies ooohed and aahed the arrival of each notable, eagerly holding out their autograph albums in the hopes that they would be inscribed by the chosen ones.
The after-dinner program was an orgy of self-congratulatory presentations, such as the outgoing association president's sophomoric eulogy to himself going on and on as one's eyes glazed over. You asked yourself just who the hell is this guy chosen by his peers to preen his feathers so flagrantly? Story Continues Below
One of the more illustrative incidents was the screening of a video showing the cubicles assigned to the White House correspondents. Mercy me, they were cramped and uncomfortable, far below the standards members of a vaunted elite might expect from the government they serve with such great courage and distinction, even to exposing themselves daily to the terrors of confronting the fierce Scott McClellan.
If it's possible for a video to whine and publicly lacrimate, this presentation achieved that feat. Unspoken in the narration was the feeling of those shown displaying their assigned White House quarters, of their being degraded by a nation they serve to such a degree and at great personal sacrifice that it places them far above the likes of soldiers and Marines who face death and disability in Iraq.
Surely they deserve extensive palatial quarters more in keeping with their exalted status. Don't we understand that they are our betters?
The camera continued to scan the room, looking eagerly for recognizable faces. It kept finding types one would scarcely welcome into one's home, such as that great dissembler Joe Wilson and his glamorous third wife, Valerie whatsername. And of course there he was, George Clooney himself, surrounded by worshipful females and pontificating about whatever political issue has caught his fancy at the moment.
What the TV viewers saw the other night was a congregation of scribblers and news readers recognizing their self-anointed status as the sole interpreters of current national events on behalf of the citizens of the United States, for whom they have great contempt. These are the people who rose up in righteous anger when the vice president, who they see as a clever but genuinely uninformed yahoo, failed to pay obeisance to them by ignoring them and allowing the story of his accidental shooting of a hunting companion to be told to ... gasp! ... a local Texas newspaper filled with ordinary reporters.
These are the people upon whom we are supposed to rely to report the news from the White House in a fair and balanced way, who are so immersed in their peculiar political credo that just about everything they believe is in complete contradiction to the feelings and beliefs of the great majority of Americans. This being the case, these great fools have convinced themselves that it is their duty and obligation to convert their fellow Americans to embrace their own whacked-out liberal prejudices and irreverence for traditional American morals and values.
In service of that objective, they believe that it is not only their right but also their duty to ignore anything that contradicts their ideological creed, distort it or flat-out lie about it. They worship at the altar of Karl Marx, they approve of same-sex marriage, wink at homosexuality, promote the murder of the unborn, abhor the military in which few of them ever served, and report unfavorably on events in Iraq, a place hardly any of them have visited during the hostilities.
Were it not for their assignments to the White House, most of them would be anonymous reporters unknown to the great mass of the American people. They are famous nobodies from anonymous backgrounds for the most part, indoctrinated in an elite academia completely in the hands of the radical left.
They hate you and they hate us, because despite all their efforts to educate us we insist on remaining immersed in the slough of our ignorance. When I look at them I picture my sainted grandmother Brennan, who always told it as it was. She would have peered down her aristocratic nose and sniffed, "Who are these people?"
Pray for Tony Snow. He'll need it in that sewer he's chosen to dwell.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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