Opinion: Because a Walter Mondale impression will probably pass muster with the White House press office...

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He was a family-friendly mini-celebrity in the seventies, a has-been in the eighties, a by-word for squaresville irrelevance in the nineties, and an I-thought-he’d-died-years-ago trivia question thereafter. Now he’s back as a family-friendly mini-celebrity, and if Rich Little can make that journey in only a little more than three decades, doesn’t he deserve all the acclaim official Washington can give him?

OK, maybe not, but the legendary impressionist, who will host this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner, is at best highly unlikely to cause the kind of high dudgeon that followed Stephen Colbert’s appearance at last year’s dinner. If you are blessed with a poor memory, you may need some help recalling the dustup that followed Colbert’s ’06 performance: See it here, here and here, and get a particularly choice piece of the Margaret Dumont umbrage that followed in this Richard Cohen column and a followup.

Now check out Little’s November appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman, where he dares to step on the toes of such no-longer-living lights as Johnny Carson, Ronald Reagan and the Smurfs. At Reason, Jeff Taylor highlights a quote from Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers: ‘We don’t need to have a blogfest and a partisan slugfest after the dinner. We don’t need that.’

We sure don’t! Washington being pretty much a black hole from which no comedy can ever escape, it’s probably best to have Rich Little back on the job and the corresponents dinner back to being what it was before the Clinton era: a safe and dull celebration of the press corps’ futility. The Colbert brouhaha was a pathetic display of the kind of self-regard and institutional stodginess that is encouraging more and more Americans to tune out both D.C. and the mainstream media. With a semi-funny performance (which I would have winnowed by about ten minutes), Colbert opened a window on a universe most of us would prefer not to see. Now Rich Little is here to reassert the eternal values.

If only Frank Gorshin were here to see it all happen: