for responding inappropriately?
A little peek at how the "Why is President Obama doing a town hall meeting in California, going on the Tonight Show" crowd spent last Saturday night (while the President absented himself for a little quality time with his family):
The media just wanted a good cuddle with their golden boy. At the annual Gridiron Club dinner in the grand ballroom of the Marriott Renaissance, the president was supposed to be at the head table, smiling and clapping as the club's journalists flounced around in costume, belting political parodies to the tunes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and Sullivan.
The president, however, had planned to skip the affair to spend time with his family at Camp David. Typical. String 'em along, get elected, go back to the wife. The nerve.
Chins up, Gridiron Club! Your show -- a 124-year tradition of back-patting and ego-pricking accompanied by the U.S. Marine Band -- went on Saturday night without a hitch, save for running nearly an hour behind schedule and earning mixed reviews. People are so hard to please these days.
. . . Then, in dire need of some liquored-up levity, the capital's journalists (laid off, bought out) and politicians (raged at, bailout-weary) sing and eat and drink and doze off and applaud and cringe, making light of their problems.
Here's NBC's Andrea Mitchell in a bear costume introducing a number that lampoons her husband, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, to the tune of "What I Did for Love" from "A Chorus Line."
. . .
Now, a quick peek backstage, where the Gridiron Club's members are donning costumes, downing drinks and simmering over the president's absence. They're "very upset" and "dissed." Not since Grover Cleveland has a president skipped the dinner in his first year in office. Obama cited family commitments, but it's entirely probable that he didn't want to be seen in white tie and tails at a $300-a-plate dinner of lobster panna cotta, yukking it up with Beltway insiders, while the economy bottoms out. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/22/AR2009032200758.htmlSo after a week of trying to smack President Obama from one end of the beltway to the other, whining about how he hasn't spent every waking minute thinking about, pondering about, worrying about and crying about the economy(always with a perfectly straight face, no smiling or laughing allowed), come Saturday night, the members of the vaunted punditry class drop their mikes and notebooks, shimmy into their finest duds (well, most of them do - Andrea Mitchell puts on a bear costume - or maybe that IS her best outfit), scamper off to a $300-a-plate dinner were they get sloshed, perform skits, and "make light of their problems."
And then, after a day to sleep it off, they're right back at it this morning, second-guessing the President's every move and beating up on him for actually
laughing, LAUGHING! during an interview.
These people are absolutely priceless!