No Place for Decent People?

I must admit, as someone who has spent his career as an inside-the-beltway type, I find the angst caused by the White House Correspondent’s Association’s annual dinner by some on the left to be vaguely confusing. Consider “j sundman” over at the Kos diaries, for example, who was driven to proclaim stuff like this:

Colbert made it clear that the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’s Association was no place for decent people. Speaking for myself, I have more respect for people who attend Ku Klux Klan rallies and neo-Nazi gatherings, for at least those people have some measure of honesty about what they stand for.

Really? A bunch of journalists getting together to booze it up, schmooze with some people they haven’t seen in a while, and do a little stargazing…they are the equivalent of Klansman and Nazis? Sure, why not. It’s an element of Bush Derangement Syndrome I suppose, but it’s still annoying.

Similarly, I get confused when a news outlet refers to the dinner and its pre-/post-parties as some sort of grave journalistic conflict of interest. The New York Times, for example, did not buy a table this year for just that reason. Special guest Craig Ferguson had a bit of fun with that, as Editor and Publisher pointed out, joking that

They felt, I just want to make sure I get this right, they felt that this event undercuts the credibility of the press. It’s funny, you see, I thought that Jayson Blair and Judy Miller took care of that. … Shut the hell up, New York Times, you sanctimonious whining jerks!

Agreed.

Anyway, this year’s meeting of Klansmen and SS officers was pretty fun; the rain held off until the evening’s after-parties, the best of which was, apparently, the Capitol File party at the Newseum. I didn’t go to the Bloomberg or Vanity Fair parties, but I will say this about the CF‘s bash: It’s unlikely that I’ll ever see Fall Out Boy guitarist Pete Wentz stage crowd surf on a tuxedo-/cocktail gown-wearing group of DCers again soon. (Also: Southern Comfort–no lime, thanks, over ice–is, arguably, the greatest drink of all time. If every party I went to had an open bar stocked entirely with different varieties of bourbon…well, I’d be hungover way more often.)