Who's Afraid of Michelle Wolf?

I never heard of Michelle Wolf before the White House Correspondents Dinner, but I'll have to pay attention to her now. It wasn't that her jokes were all that good, but she sure knew how to get under everyone's skin, particularly Sarah Huckabee, who served as Trump's proxy at the event. For me, it was her grating voice, but it worked in this case.

What the Trump base got was a little bit of its own medicine. Michelle was raucous, dirty and at times downright malicious in her attack. No one was spared in Trump's administration, least of all the Chief Clown. "It turns out the President of the United States is the one pussy you can't grab," noting his absence for the second year in a row.

For his part, the President was in Michigan offering a running commentary of the WHCD among other things in his long-winded harangue. But, this didn't match the performance he gave on Fox and Friends the day before, leaving the crew absolutely speechless after thirty minutes of a non-stop diatribe.

It's pretty hard to top Trump, so Michelle went after his surrogates. She was hardest on Sarah, who sat at the front table with her. You could see Huckabee grimace through most of the monologue. She left it to her father the next day to chastise Wolf for going too far, calling it "tasteless, classless bullying." Seems like someone should remind Mike of his own tweets. A guy who still refers to himself as Governor.

Surprisingly, the media also chastised Wolf. Andrea Mitchell said Michelle should apologize for "insulting" poor Sarah in a tweet. Andrea got the response she deserved.

Of course, Trump himself chimed in, calling the dinner a "failure" and Wolf "filthy," noting that the 100 year-old tradition should be "put to rest." It really makes you wonder where all these fragile sensibilities came from?

I still don't understand why they don't invite Alec Baldwin to stand in for Trump at these dinners. He continues his routine on SNL, which has come under attack from alums like Rob Schneider, who hasn't had a watchable movie since he left SNL in the 90s. Dennis Miller apparently needs a few days to come up with something scathing on Michelle Wolf.

Michelle gave it a game effort, and thanks to all the criticism is now the most recognizable comic on television. Not bad for a C-SPAN live stream. She also got some high fives from Dave Chappelle and Adam Conover, who noted her brutal takedown of the all-too-complicit news media.

"You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you use to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He's helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster and now you're profiting off of him. And if you are going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money because he doesn't have any."

Of course, she will be just as easily forgotten in a few days time given Trump's many pratfalls. But, for a brief shining moment she got more attention than Kanye!

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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