WASHINGTON – The response by pundits to Wanda Sykes’ comedic monologue at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was instantaneous and predictable. On every program, the knee-jerk line was the same: The woman went too far. She was way over the top. Too partisan. Too mean. She even made the cynical press corp nervous with her comments about Rush Limbaugh.

Heavens to Betsy!

Here’s what she said:

“Rush Limbaugh said he hope this administration fails. So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails.’ He just wants the country to fail. To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything different than what Osama Bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think maybe Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight.”

Sykes turned to her right, where the president was sitting. “Too much?”

She seemed to consider for a second whether to continue or not. ”Rush Limbaugh? ‘I hope the country fails’,” she said. “I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a little waterboarding. That’s what he needs.”

The last line was met with scattered laughter and a low rumble of groans. If people had been using laugh-o-meters, the line would have dipped down on the chart. She forged ahead with the rest of her routine, but the review of her performance was already being written. The woman went too far. And she wasn’t even as funny as Stephen Colbert three years ago, when he “went too far.”

Say, what? Sykes took an unfair swipe at Limbaugh? There is a line of propriety with respect to El Duce II? I didn’t know that. I thought the right was currently outraged  – as well they should be – at the steep slide toward censorship that Britain is taking and which they expect America’s Left to emulate. (Of course, America has a First Amendment where Britain does not, so their fears regarding the latter point are only borderline lucid.)

Almost to a pundit, the Sunday morning talk shows continued the theme. I cannot remember one person on any of the shows come to Sykes’ defense. Across the board, the line was the same; President Obama’s routine was spot on, funny, balanced in its targets and delivered without malice. Sykes’ was mean-spirited, partisan and mostly unfunny.

Let’s set aside for amoment the painful spectacle of rigid Washington-based opinion-makers assessing the comedy of Wanda Sykes, who has always had chops and cojones the size of Texas, maybe bigger. Why weren’t they as put off by her comments about Vice-President Joe Biden?

“God forbid that Joe Biden falls into the hands of terrorists. God forbid if it’s ever a hostile situation. We’re done. Oh, they won’t even have to torture him. All they have to do is go, ‘How’s it going, Joe,” she said. “’What did you do, did you waterboard him? No, I just said, ‘nice weather,’ and he’s still talking. Can’t listen to him anymore, it’s like torture.’”

For some reason, the Limbaugh comments were off the charts while a joke in a similar vein about the veep was not. She also went after Nancy Pelosi, but no one seemed to hear that when they accuse her of writing a partisan routine that revealed the inner-meanness of the leftist mentality. That will be the line this week from the unholy TV trinity of Hannity, O’Reilly and Beck, by the way. On the left, expect Olbermann and Maddow to take the contrary line, but only because it is the contrary line.

Videos of the speeches by President Obama and Wanda Sykes are below. I laughed a lot through both of them. He has great timing and her hesitant delivery, the way she seemed to sneak up on her own jokes, made the impact of her routine all the more effective, especially for those who didn’t appreciate it.