It is maybe the best move he's made as president. Obama is now the first president since Grover Cleveland to skip a Gridiron dinner in his first year in office (and he's the first black president ever to skip it!), because he wanted to spend the weekend with his family, not at a too-cozy tone-deaf mutual jackoff session hosted by the press featuring "entertainment" by elected officials and the US Marine Band.

So, yeah, Joe Biden did his thing, with the stupid jokes, and some other people told some more stupid jokes, etc.

And hey, who'll step up to the plate to accept the annual "Bob Novak award for exemplifying everything broken and gross about Washington and the press"? How about NBC's own Mrs. Greenspan?

Here's NBC's Andrea Mitchell in a bear costume introducing a number that lampoons her husband, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, to the tune of "What I Did for Love" from "A Chorus Line."

Kiss the Dow goodbye . . .

And let the markets tumble.

Ha ha ha, it's funny because she's a long-standing member of the media establishment that spent years sucking her husband's cock and calling him the smartest money genius in the world, until the bubble he helped inflate burst and took down everything because of a because of a "flaw in the model that [he] perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." It's fun to be insulated from the results of your actions!

Everyone who attends these dinners should be sent to jail.

In today's Observer, John Koblin explores Mitchell's secret gay fanbase—they seem to love her because she reminds them of all the Golden Girls, at once? And also because of balloons? There is really something here we're not quite getting.

Did she ever. We reached out to more people, and we got another call! This time it came from a 28-year-old gay man from Dallas named—wait for it—Wence Woolridge. He told us that he wasn’t even sure who Andrea Mitchell was, but …

“I actually saw her profile on another gay guy’s MySpace and I saw her picture and I was just drawn to it,” he said, as we began salivating. “I can’t say why, but I just instantly added her. I never really heard of her before and I can’t say I really know who she is. I just went for it.”

Mitchell is apparently a catty, campy Bette Midler, with DC as her bathhouse, or something. And the weird marriage to old toad Alan Greenspan is just icing on the cake! "You know, the beautifully aging diva shacking up with the powerful older man, and falling madly in love." Ok! We'd say the implication here is that Mitchell is Greenspan's beard, the Judy to his Vincente Minnelli, but would an empowered success story like Mitchell really live such a lie? Would she need to? (On the other hand, Greenspan did date Barbara Walters, which is a closet case red flag.) (Also, political journalism is a lot like a bathhouse, isn't it!)

But between this and the adulation, mentioned in the article, that New York gays felt for Hillary, adulation that only grew as her candidacy became more of a farce, we really have to ask our gay brothers to please be more discerning in choosing their new icons, because they're now just throwing their semi-ironic love at any powerful aging blonde diva. Where is the ultimately, inevitably tragic arc of their life stories?

DC is an incestuous town and everyone knows and is basically friends with everyone else. The media-political complex has lots and lots of intermarried "journalists" and "operatives" and everyone has politely agreed to assume that everyone else is totally professional about it. So they get a bit tetchy when the Columbia Journalism Review is all "disclose your relationships or just be more independent or something" because what do those kids know?

If Tom Brokaw wants to play golf with John McCain that is his business (note: we don't know if John McCain can play golf but the two are still definitely probably friends). The standard argument is that one has to find concrete evidence of "bias" before one can claim these chummy relationships are no good, but honestly the "bias" is so ingrained in the process that it's a useless task and one is best served by appyling a gimlet-eyed suspicion to everyone one sees on the TV and then voting for Ron Paul.