The best dressed wing

But that’s precisely what happened on Saturday night, when Hollywood mingled with the powers that be at the White House Correspondents Dinner

This year’s primaries, the 2008 primaries, the General Services Administration scandal, even the Secret Service and Donald Trump were targets for President Barack Obama’s scattershot humour at Saturday night’s celebrity-studded White House Correspondents Dinner.

Even the entrance to his speech was part of his schtick. The president walked off stage just before he took the podium with an alleged “hot mic,” making fun of getting caught last month on an open microphone with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

“What am I doing here,” he asks off stage. “I’m opening for Jimmy Kimmel and telling knock-knock jokes to Kim Kardashian.”

Once on stage, the president revisited last year’s dinner, which took place as Navy SEALS were dispatched to capture and kill Osama bin Laden.

“Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals,” Obama said. Then a picture of real estate mogul Donald Trump appeared on the room’s television monitors. The president last year delivered a scathing roast of Trump, who flirted with running for the Republican nomination and claimed he had solved the “mystery” of Obama’s birth certificate.

Kimmel, the night’s featured entertainer, picked up on the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Columbia, saying he told the Secret Service that for $800 he wouldn’t joke about them, “but they only offered 30.”

“If this had happened on President Clinton’s watch, you can damn well bet those Secret Service agents would have been disciplined with a very serious high five,” Kimmel said.

Kimmel later asked Obama: “You remember when the country rallied around you in hopes of a better tomorrow? That was hilarious.”

“There’s a term for guys like President Obama,” Kimmel said with a pause. “Probably not two terms.”

Among the eclectic crowd attending Saturday night’s dinner were former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the cast of the hit TV show Modern Family, actress Lindsey Lohan, George Clooney and director Steven Spielberg.

Proceeds from the dinner go toward scholarships for aspiring journalists and awards for distinction in the profession.