Presidential Humor and The Press

I’ve read a number of commentaries about President Obama’s drone strike “joke” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on May 1, some comparing it with President Bush’s shtick looking for the elusive WMDs in front of that audience in 2006. Such comparisons are fitting, but I have yet to see one which really hits at the heart of the matter and highlights the enormity of the “faux pas.”

While there is no questioning (or shouldn’t be—at least among rational adults) the fact that joking about death, war, war crimes, and murder is never appropriate, there are two particularly disturbing things about these attempts at humor. The first is what they reveal about the attitudes of our leaders—the purported “Leaders of the Free World” (and what they reveal is not flattering). The second is what they say about this particular audience.

With President Bush, at least, we all knew his attitude about The Enemy, The Terrorists, the dark-skinned “others.” His “cowboy diplomacy” (coming from a man who is neither a cowboy nor a diplomat) made apparent his utter disregard for the lives of “The Enemy”—civilian or not. What was especially illustrative about Bush’s “joke” was the way in which he brazenly and unabashedly flaunted his lawlessness and fraud. By the time of this dinner, it was well known—even if mostly ignored by the media—that the administration was fully aware that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to Al Qaida or 9/11; these were lies told repeatedly and intentionally to manipulate Congress and a fearful populace into supporting a war which had been decided upon long before.

President Obama has on numerous occasions given speeches, made appearances on Arabic-language television, and otherwise overtly tried to change the tone of America’s international dialogue (or even to acknowledge the need for having a dialogue) and win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. A polar opposite of Dubya in matters of diplomacy, President Barack “Nobel Peace Prize” Obama has gone out of his way to give the impression of empathy with the rest of the world. How can he possibly expect such overtures to be taken seriously any longer after making jokes about America’s criminal drone assassination program—a program which has resulted in the murder and maiming of arguably as many civilians as “Terrorists”?

In my opinion, vastly more consequential than demonstrating how disgustingly craven our political leaders are is the fact that those leaders (and their speech writers) would think such subject matter appropriate for this audience. After all, these journalists who cover the White House for the major media outlets are the very people whose job it should be to keep our elected leaders in check, tirelessly and dutifully reporting to the electorate when those leaders fall short and betray our trust. Instead, the Pres. and the Press snicker knowingly to themselves and seem to say, “Screw you, America; this is a private party, and you weren’t invited!”