What do Chipotle and the White House Correspondent’s Dinner have in common?
Easy. After the meal, everyone’s a little queasy.
Except for Kathy Griffin. She’s furious. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner proved conclusively one picture is still worth a thousand words. The photo of Griffin holding a decapitated Trump head torpedoed her career. For months her reputation was in such bad shape that when Griffin appeared in the news it was like a sighting of Sasquatch or Harvey Weinstein.
And irony of ironies, Kathy was at the correspondent’s dinner! She sat through Michelle Wolf’s crude and vulgar 2,400-word routine that savaged President Trump, the Trump family and his administration. Griffin defended Wolf in the face of widespread backlash, but I’m guessing when she got home, Kathy’s Trump head was in for a very rough time.
It was the injustice of it all. After only one photo Griffin can’t book a lunchtime public appearance at Costco giving away pot stickers, while Michelle Wolf will enjoy an audience bump when her Netflix series begins later in May.
If Kathy had waited until after the Correspondent’s Dinner to unveil her decapitated Trump on a #Resistance-filled world, she could have had a co-hosting gig with Joy Reid on MSLSD. But Griffin was too early. And, as any good comedian will tell you, timing is everything in comedy.
Dinner organizers and opposition media attendees are still having trouble digesting Wolf’s routine. Even employees of media outlets regularly slow-roasted by Trump were taken aback by the sheer unfunny savagery of Wolf’s rant. It’s fortunate the one-year term of the WHCA president concludes shortly after the dinner, otherwise there might have been calls for resignations or an Adam Schiff investigation.
When the dinner controversy popped up on Drudge, I assumed the unprofessional vulgarity-fest must have been part of an open mic portion of the program, and Wolf was the first exhibitionist to reach the podium. Instead, Wolf was recruited and paid to perform. Outgoing WHCA president Margaret Talev didn’t go so far as to apologize for the Wolf pack assault but she did her best to spin the disaster and shift the blame.
She told CNN, “Comedy is meant to be provocative. My interest overwhelmingly was in unifying the country, and I understand that we may have fallen a little bit short on that goal.” Unless her idea of unification only extends from Antifa to the Deep State. Talev also assured America that she didn’t see or otherwise examine Wolf’s monologue prior to the event, as if ignorance was absolution.
That’s not a dog-ate-my-homework excuse. It’s a dog-did-my-homework excuse.
You could tell Talev was perplexed that anyone would hold her responsible for Wolf’s performance. This is probably due to leftists’ unfamiliarity with how capitalism functions. The person who signs the check, bears the responsibility — unless he has really good lawyers.
Talev, a Bloomberg News reporter, simply employed the industry-standard OpMedia research practices when she booked Wolf. Verification was confined to discovering if Wolf hated Trump. With that established, it’s a given that what would come out of her mouth was sure to be enjoyed by the audience.
And what a potty mouth it was!
I read the complete transcript of the speech to save my readers the trouble. What struck me was buried under the steaming pile of invective was a very funny speech that would have been perfectly acceptable to a nationwide audience. Cutting the vulgar, unfunny and insulting portions would have reduced the length by 1,000 words. The edited version was sharp, creative and parts were slightly risque. Wolf’s membership in the ‘Resistance’ would have remained unchallenged and association honchos would not have been fielding high, hard ones,
Unfortunately, as far as the left is concerned, today there is no room for peaceful coexistence with Trump and/or conservatives. This is why for Michelle Wolf poking fun wasn’t enough. She had to poke out some eyes.
The WHCD program held no surprises for the Trump administration. They know the OpMedia hates them. The dinner simply revealed the truth to the rest of America.
The Morning Consult did a nationwide survey in early April a few weeks before the dinner. One of the questions asked if the respondents considered the “national news” to be “liberal, conservative or centrist/non-partisan.” 36 percent of the pre-dinner sample either had no opinion or thought the media was centrist/non-partisan.
Meg Kinnard, of the virulently anti-Trump Associated Press, had an epiphany after the dinner. She tweeted, “If the #WHCD dinner did anything tonight, it made the chasm between journalists and those who don’t trust us, even wider.”
Exactly. It revealed the ugly truth to the confused 36 percent who formerly gave the news media the benefit of the doubt.

Michael Shannon is a commentator and public relations consultant, and is the author of “A Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times.” He can be reached at mandate.mmpr@gmail.com.