There was a time I never thought I'd type the sentence, "I agree with most of what Jonah Goldberg says in this essay" but I do. And I think it makes more sense to talk about "coalition instincts" than "tribal instincts" because a coalition is something you may join for a short time to achieve one immediate goal, whereas tribalism flows more from religion, race or some other circumstance of your birth.
Hypocrisy aside, two things bother me about the objections to Michelle Wolf's speech. One is the misreporting that makes it sounds like she trashed Sarah Huckabee Sanders' looks. That is a misreporting of facts worthy of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. And then there's this complaint that she was not funny.
About "not funny": First off, even in that badly-miked room with a self-conscious audience that rarely guffaws at anything, Wolf got a lot of laughs. I sometimes go see a performer or film that fails to amuse me but all around me, others are howling. Two of many examples would be the movie Borat and the current Broadway play, The Play That Goes Wrong. With others voting audibly to the contrary, I feel it would be an act of sheer arrogance not to differentiate between "It wasn't funny" and "It wasn't funny to me." It is not the job of any comedian in any venue to make every single person who is watching or listening laugh.
I didn't find all of Ms. Wolf's act funny. I can't think of anyone who ever did the White House Correspondents' Dinner who didn't have some lines land with a thud. I mean, it's not like you can go to other, less visible White House Correspondents' Dinners first and test out your material on other gatherings of prominent politicians and media figures so you can discard or rewrite the clunkers.
When Michelle Wolf says today as she has, "I wouldn't change a word of what I said," that's a bit disingenuous. She would have cut or rephrased a dozen or so of the lines that got the weakest responses. She might have made some of the harsh lines harsher. Heck, now that she's being pilloried for insulting the press secretary's appearance, she might even figure she's got nothing to lose by doing so. She could even steal some of the fat jokes Donald Trump used to make about Rosie O'Donnell. Welcome to the Trump Era, where some people hold comedians to a higher standard of taste than we expect of the President of the United States.