Rove's Got Them Happy Feet (Updated)

Did anyone ever expect to be able to put the words "Karl Rove" and "Bust a Move" in the same sentence? After last night, yes.

Does this giddy jig mean the president's deputy chief of staff had finally made the transition from George Bush's hatchet man to court jester to the Imperial Presidency? Of course not. This was just a return to the traditional glad-handing of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association's Annual Dinner. After Stephen Colbert received pundit flack and popular acclaim for daring to treat this annual roast as, well, a roast, the Washington press corps soft-balled the event. Instead of getting a satirist in to pick off some easy targets, they hired Whose Line Is It Anyway's Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood (to which a nation mused, "Is that show still on?").

And if you thought the Rove rumba was the low point on political indignity, strap in. The press corps worked overtime to look ludicrous in public. Evening anchor Brian Williams embarrassed himself by burping "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Even MSNBC's normally tough-talking David Gregory blew a little of his credibility by going all Sparkle Motion for the presidential aide.

How soon, by the way, before some creative type on the president's Internet gets hold of the footage and has MC Karl doing his drunk-uncle-at-a-party shuffle on top of a stack of bodies from Iraq or in still-ruined districts of New Orleans or in the mold-coated corridors of Walter Reed Hospital?

Of course, if the Washington press corps had some real stones, we would have had Katie "Tough but Fair-to-Competent" Couric repeating her "Some people say" tactic, as deployed on Sen. John and Elizabeth Edwards, on White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. After all, the Democrat presidential contender's wife's cancer was deemed fair game, so why not the Bush flack's own illness? We'll even give her the opening line: "Some people say, Tony, that you made your recent recurrence of liver cancer a public matter so that you could duck out, leaving journalists to contend with your deputy, the often scarcely coherent Dana Perino."

By the way, did anyone ever find those "some people say" people? And were any of them onstage at the association dinner?

Update (by Wells Dunbar): Prying open the seventh chamber of hell. Think Progress has video of Rove's appearance at the dinner – suffice to say, MC Rove's rhyming skills rest somewhere between Barney Rubble's Fruity Pebbles flow and the oft-forgotten single from "Rappin'" Rodney Dangerfield. Oh, and he admits to tearing the heads off of small animals!