Photo credit: Courtesy of The Renaissance Hotel
Sequestration is no laughing matter, but if you attended the White Tie dinner hosted by members of The Gridiron Club on Saturday night, you know it can be.
“Because of ‘sequester,’ they cut my tails,” said President Obama.
“There is one thing in Washington that didn’t get cut: The length of this dinner. Yet more proof that the sequester makes no sense.”
The annual dinner is a joke fest on current events where no one is spared. Chuck Hagel, now Secretary of Defense, was having an eye opening time in Afghanistan last week, but Obama had this to say about his new cabinet member: “I’m also doing what I can to smooth things over with Republicans in Congress. In fact these days John McCain and I are spending so much time together that he told me we were becoming friends. I said, ‘John, stop, Chuck Hagel warned me how this ends up,’ “
We wanted to know about Hagel’s sense of humor so we asked journalist and author Myra MacPherson (a Hagel expert) what she thought.
“He can do hilarious imitations,” MacPherson told us, “and did so about some fellow senators. He recognizes his own tendency to pontificate, saying in a speech in a mock prayer “give me wings to get straight to the point.” As a visionary in the cell phone world, nobody understood what he was talking about. In “Get Smart” fashion, when the character comic detective in the TV show used to talk into his shoe, Chuck would take off his shoe, put it up to his ear and say “in 10 years everyone is going to go around with a phone up to their ears.” Some laughed in disbelief but he made a fortune.
