President Obama this week took the unusual step of appearing with Zach Galifianakis on his online ersatz talk show, "Between Two Ferns." If Obama's goal was to encourage younger Americans to check out the Affordable Care Act, then the President can rightly declare "Mission Accomplished": the Funny or Die web site is now the number one source of referrals to Healthcare.gov.
Needless to say, Obama's conservative foes are apoplectic. The right-wing blogosphere called it "an awful development" which "smacks of desperation." For its part, Time called him "the first cringe humor President."
As it turns out, they have short memories along with no sense humor. They conveniently forgot the most cringe-worthy moment in the history of presidential wit, one which occurred just ten years ago.
In his presentation at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, President George W. Bush showed his contempt for the truth and the suffering of the American people. His tasteless White House slideshow made light of the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the justification Bush offered for the war in the first place. Coming one year and hundreds of American dead and wounded after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush the cut-up hoped to regale the audience with his White House hijinx. As David Corn of The Nation reported:

Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

But as the dismal history shows, President Bush wasn't content to try to laugh off his greatest failures and endless wrongdoing. As his teasing of the blind, the disabled, U.S. soldiers and African-Americans among others confirms, President Bush was laughing at us, not with us.