Dear God, I despise this self-congratulatory annual ritual for a Washington press corps that so very rarely does its job. Television has really skewed the equation, because some print reporters are too busy hustling for those lucrative cable gigs to give much thought to the fate of actual human beings affected by the policies they ignore in favor of inside baseball: They're lemmings who turn in unison toward the latest bright, shiny object and have all the reasoning ability of a precocious twelve-year-old (although I might be insulting twelve-year-olds). Other than that, gee, I hope they all have a really good time dressing up, sucking up and hanging out with second-tier celebrities at Nerd Prom: For decades, the nation's chief executives have headlined the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, delivering monologues to mock political opponents, inquiring journalists — and themselves. "It's an opportunity for the public to see a president in a different light," said Landon Parvin, who helped presidents Ronald Reagan and George W.