I know the White House Correspondents' Dinner is old news by now, and we've all hashed over Stephen Colbert's performance (which I thought was hilarious, though I wasn't wild about the film) -- but here's something about the dinner, from a New York Observer style reporter, that made my jaw drop:

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, reeked of eccentric power and masculinity that Saturday, looking New Lagerfeldesque under white hair and black sunglasses. He was on the veranda of the Washington Hilton, talking to a group of writers that included New York Times columnists David Brooks and Maureen Dowd.

"It's sizzling tonight at the White House correspondents' dinner," said Mr. Wieseltier. "All the men are hard."

His Op-Ed audience laughed -- Oh, Leon! -- but the man had a point. Something was definitely sizzling in the District!

"It's hard for me to say without seeming immodest," said Mr. Wieseltier.

Yikes.

(Emphasis in original.)

You remember the hard Mr. Wieseltier, of course. He was a signer of the PNAC open letter that called for regime change in Iraq nine days after 9/11. He also uses The New York Times Book Review to mount the occasional pitbull assault on writers who don't meet his political or religious standards. (He did, however, desrcribe Ms. Toni Bentley's anal-sex memoir, The Surrender, as a "small masterpiece of erotic writing" -- which, I guess, ties this all together.)