Last night at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore compared President Barack Obama to Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry because they both “like raining down bombs on people from long distances.”
The audience of Washington, D.C., journalists, politicians and celebrities reacted with pained “oooooooh’s,” as did Obama himself (before grinning widely).
By contrast, the audience laughed with delight at the same dinner in 2010 when Obama warned the Jonas Brothers to stay away from his daughters or he would kill them with a predator drone:
Of course, all the D.C. elites who laughed with Obama would be (rightfully) horrified if Vladimir Putin casually joked about killing anyone he wanted with the same weapons Russia uses to bomb Syria.
Nevertheless, Obama’s witticism remains beloved by the Washington Post, which called it one of “the president’s sharpest quips” the next day and this week named it one of his “10 most hilarious lines” of his whole presidency at the correspondents’ dinner.
By the time Obama made his Jonas Brothers joke, the United States had, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, killed a minimum of 679 people in drone strikes in Pakistan alone. This included at least 138 civilians, of whom at least 42 were children. By now victims of U.S. drones number in the thousands worldwide.
What makes Obama’s drone joke particularly non-funny is that on the same night in 2010 — just a few hours before Obama spoke — a Bridgeport, Conn., man, Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square. After Shahzad was captured, he stated that one of his main motivations to kill Americans was “the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan.”
Top photo: President Barack Obama poses at White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Wilmore is at far right.
IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.
What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.
This is not hyperbole.
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.
That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?
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