2017 Mar 29^th

The “big news” this morning is that the White House sycophants have decided to side with their boss and boycott the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner. Nixon and Carter also skipped this event and so did Reagan, but Reagan had a good excuse, he had recently been shot. (He did phone in however.)Trump declared some time ago that he would not be attending.

 I doubt that this will have much effect on the overall dinner attendance. Most of the attendees will be looking forward to seeing Alec Baldwin do his brilliantly funny Trump imitation. You may remember last year when President Obama did a takedown of Trump while Trump sat a captive in the audience. The President went on at some length about the release of his Hawaii long form birth certificate. Trump had, for years, asked many questions about Obama’s birth certificate, his school records and, in general, questions about his legitimacy as president. The 2016 dinner was payback time and the payback was done with accrued interest.

I’m not surprised that Trump is bowing out of this WHCA gig. The president is expected to make some funny remarks, usually self-deprecating funny remarks. Has anyone ever heard Donald Trump intentionally say anything funny? Has anyone ever heard him crack a joke, make a pun or tell a funny story? I don’t hang on Trump’s every word but I’ve never heard even Fox News repeat a funny remark made by Donald Trump. As for Donald J. Trump making a self-deprecating remark, any writer employed to write funny stuff for The Donald knows better than to even attempt that if he/she expects to remain employed. April 29^th is the dinner’s date; it should be fun.

On to things of lesser importance: We have the mystery of congressman Nunes, chair of the house intelligence committee, charged with investigating events surrounding Russian intrusion into our election. Nunes made some curious visits to the White House; he claims they were to receive some intelligence that he then returned to the White House to share with its principal occupant. But, his congressional committee is supposed to be investigating this very person’s Russian connections.

There were several press conferences held by Nunes during his White House adventures. Unfortunately, Nunes could only say that he couldn’t really say anything because he had been briefed by a high level intelligence source and of course he couldn’t reveal this source, nor could he reveal the information the source provided. Unfortunately, none of the assembled press bothered to ask Nunes why he was holding a press conference if all he could say was that he had shared some information he couldn’t reveal from a source he couldn’t reveal with the president. In many circumstance at least one member of the press would be impertinent enough to ask this question…but not now.

Nunes apologized to his committee members for not consulting them first but offered no explanation about why he did what he did. Then he cancelled all the committee meetings without rescheduling them. One of the people scheduled to testify at the cancelled meetings was Sally Yates, the fired deputy attorney general who sent information to the president about General Flynn, and she also refused to enforce the illegal immigration order. Naturally Trump fired her, although now she was about to testify…but alas Nunes had cancelled the meeting at which this might have occurred.

Calls for Nunes to step down have fallen on Speaker Ryan’s deaf ears; he claims he still has confidence in Nunes to do his job so there he will stay. Maybe the Senate committee will do better…they can do no worse.