Unlike Mark Steyn and John Hinderaker I really love the annual White House Correspondents dinner. I love it so much in fact I’ve never watched a single minute of it live. It’s like a long sought gift I’m saving to open until sometime after, I don’t know…2029 maybe. So I don’t intend to end this streak now, but if you missed the wall-to-wall coverage of this over the weekend…unintentionally…I’ve embedded the President’s complete performance below. I understand it’s pretty hilarious (not really).

But what I want to do here is just take a brief moment to acknowledge who the real winner of the night was. Aside from people like me, that is. No, I’m talking of course about the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher, or as he likes to jokingly refer to himself on Twitter, ‘Jim’ ‘Treacher’. (This is a pseudonym for those who don’t know.) For anyone unaware, Treacher is responsible for publicizing President Obama’s admission in Dreams of My Father that he ate dog meat as a child in Indonesia, countering Democrat attacks on Mitt Romney for transporting a family dog on the roof of his car 30 years ago. Treacher’s find had already been widely covered throughout the media prior to this weekend. But it has effectively become a part of history now, as official lore from the 2012 campaign, with the President himself joking repeatedly on Saturday night about his dog-eating past.

I know a thing or two about injecting counter-narratives into the broader media, and there is no more difficult thing to do as a blogger. Only a few years ago this type of thing would have been truly impossible, and even now with the speed and reach of new media it is still incredibly hard. For proof, just try it some time. But to write a blog post and then watch the President himself joke about it only weeks later? That’s the blogging equivalent of a supernova – truly spectacular!

Now it’s a long time until November and there will be plenty more narratives to counter so we shouldn’t get too carried away. But for de-fanging a media attack long-planned, and carefully orchestrated by Democrats, I thought Treacher was deserving of a little recognition from Hot Air. I can only imagine that this has been all that much sweeter for him given that not long after joining the ranks of professional bloggers he was seriously injured when, rumor has it, he was run down by an unmarked government car while trying to save a dog from a busy street. I may have gotten this last bit wrong, but the point is: major kudos ‘Jim’. Very well done, which incidentally I hear is how Obama likes his flank.