Here’s why it’s a huge mistake not to have a comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, according to former Obama staffer David Litt.
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Last year, as you probably remember, the Trump White House manufactured this huge, fake controversy over Michelle Wolf’s performance at the Correspondents’ Dinner.

This year the White House Correspondents Association’ said, forget it. No more comedian. Here’s why that’s a big mistake.

Bob hope done the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. George Carlin. Richard Pryor. Paula Poundstone. Wanda Sykes. We have had a comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner for decades straight.

And I will tell you as a former presidential staffer, no White House likes being made fun of. Every year, people made fun of Obama.

But we never manufactured a bunch of outrage for no reason, because it’s just a joke. What’s the big deal? If you have such a thin skin, you should not be in politics in the first place.

And more important, there’s something fundamentally democratic about having someone stand up in front of the leader of the free world and make fun of them a little bit.

Think about what the White House said when they tried to pull Jim Acosta’s press pass for the briefing room. The word they used was ‘decorum.’

This is a White House that is obsessed with gestures of respect, and so the Correspondents’ Association, in a weird way, is a celebration of disrespect. For one night only, we are reminding everyone that yeah, you can make fun of powerful people to their face in a democracy, and you don’t have to apologize for that.

It’s a reminder that in a democracy, we don’t just talk about free speech, we exercise free speech. Can you imagine this happening in Putin’s Russia, or in Saudi Arabia, or in China?

Of course not. But it happens in America, and it’s kind of special, even when it crosses the line a tiny bit.

#Comedy #Politics #WHCD #WhiteHouse #Trump #WhiteHouseCorrespondentsDinner

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