It Suddenly Becomes Okay to Do Dog Eating Jokes

Looks like Obama and his media sycophants have finally realized they can't beat the "Obama Eats Dogs" meme so they decided to try and diffuse it by joining in the jokes at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.  From Morning Jolt:

Power Line's John Hinderaker notices:

Politically, the most interesting phenomenon last night was the dog jokes. The President himself made three jokes about eating dogs. This represents a victory for new media and especially for Jim Treacher, since liberal news sources like the New York Times and Jon Stewart had studiously tried to pretend that the dog controversy didn't exist. Obama and Kimmel evidently recognized that Twitter made such pretense impossible. (The New York Times, however, is still holding out.)

Events like last night's always leave me feeling in need of a shower. Partly it is because there some truth to Kimmel's joke, after noting that the room was full of politicians, members of the media and celebrities, that "Everything that is wrong with America is here in this room." Partly [it] is due to the sense that everyone involved in the event is pretending. The politicians pretend to engage in self-deprecation that shows they don't take themselves too seriously. The comics pretend that they are just trying to be funny, lampooning politicians impartially in search of laughs. But, even though some of the lines are indeed funny, the premise of the event is fundamentally false. In fact, politicians, comedians and even the celebrities present are pursuing an agenda that is both self-aggrandizing and political. That is why, I think, such events always leave me feeling unclean.

In the Corner, our Mark Steyn concurred:

I share John Hinderaker's general line on the general loathsomeness of the White House Correspondents' Dinner -- I dislike both the self-flattering fake self-deprecation of the pols and the fawning defanged jabs of the comics. A ghastly business. But I also share his appreciation for the only novel aspect of last night's affair. My weekend column addressed Romney's dog-transporting and Obama's dog-eating -- the former referenced by New York Times columnist Gail Collins some four dozen or so times, the latter not at all by her or any other Times bigshot. And yet there was the President of the United States up on stage doing dog-eating shtick in front of the nation. That represents an amazingly swift victory for the man who, all but entirely via Twitter, injected the topic into the public discourse -- Jim Treacher.

Indeed, as The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta wrote:

My favorite DC/world disconnect at #WHCD dinner l[a]st nite was when frmr politico now in NY asked why Obama kept talking about eating dogs.

It's not really a "DC/world" disconnect so much as a housetrained media/freelance bloodhound disconnect. If you rely for your news on the poodles of the Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, or the self-neutered attack-dogs of the late-night comedy shows, you would, like Ms Franke-Ruta's friend, have been utterly in the dark.

The old media desperately tried to keep the focus on Mitt Romney's dog but failed as the new media fought back. This is going to happen a lot during this campaign.