Peter Baker, sometime wanker/White House reporter for the WaPo, has a new job: flacking for the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Baker writes breathlessly in today's WaPo ("The A-List Makes the Guest List") about all the "[m]ovie stars, professional athletes, celebrity chefs and, oh yes, even a White House official or two" scheduled to show up for next month's association dinner. "Celebrity chefs?"
Here's who Baker, who either must be on the publicity committee for the event or needs to cut back drastically on his meds, thinks is "A-List" material: Tim Daly, Eric Dane, Harvey Keitel, Ed Westwick, Hayden Panettiere, Joel McHale, Lauren Conrad, Marcia Cross, Chelsea Handler, Padma Lakshmi, and Ben Affleck. (OK, we like Affleck and McHale, but seriously...) Once more we will have the spectacle of celebrity-struck "journalists" mixing with pols mixing with... "A-List" celebrities. Frankly, it looks more like C-List celebrities mixing with C-List pols mixing with C-List "journalists," all for the purpose of making each other feel important and powerful. Meanwhile, John Peter Zenger is rotating furiously in his grave.
UPDATE: Remember how at the 2004 WHCA dinner Preznit Chimpy pretended to look for WMD at the White House? Big chuckles all around from the "journalists", even a full year after the war started and as the evidence mounted that they were punked by Chimpy. Your independent press at work.
