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Rich Little will be speaking at the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 21, and he has promised not to be too hard on President Bush, unlike last year's speaker, Stephen Colbert.

"I won't even mention the word 'Iraq,'" Little told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He also said this: "They don't want anyone knocking the president. He's really over the coals right now, and he's worried about his legacy."

Colbert-loving commentators have gotten worked up over the selection of Little, an impersonator who clearly won't be delivering anything like Colbert's searing satire from last year, a speech that delighted some but struck others as inappropriate.

Here's the thing, though: Complaining about the speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner is sort of like complaining that your new insect overlords aren't offering much of a health care plan. That is, it's missing the point. The issue isn't who speaks at the dinner so much as the dinner itself, which has outlived any usefulness it might once have had.

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For some reporters, the White House Correspondents Dinner is more than just another night at the prom. For CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, it turned out to be a working dinner – one in which she gained a piece of information from a fellow attendee that ended up having quite the effect on markets (as Fed chairmen’s remarks so often do). From the Financial Times (via TVNewser):

Stocks fell on Monday after CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo revealed on air that Ben Bernanke felt his testimony last week had been “misunderstood.”

The anchor said Mr Bernanke had told her at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington on Saturday that he had not intended the markets to infer that the Fed was nearly done raising interest rates.

“I asked him whether the markets got it right after his congressional testimony and he said, flatly, no,” Ms Bartiromo said. She was reporting live from floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the resulting trading roar almost drowned out the rest of her remarks.

FT procured one market strategist to interpret the situation. Said Alan Ruskin, a strategist at RBC Greenwich Capital: “It comes off as a great example of over-communication and a possible attempt to over-fine-tune, assuming he was willing to go on the record with these comments - CNBC is not the Fed’s obvious port of call to correct market expectations.”

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