What Helen Thomas said was insensitive and mean. There is no excuse for it. Criticizing her for her tirade is valid. But the attacks coming now are completely off base and equally deranged. In some ways, Howard Kurtz's hit job is most cowardly. He didn't even have the decency of doing the dirty work himself, choosing to stab her with a borrowed knife:
She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask
-- CBS Stenographer Mark Knoller
Really? When was the last time CBS brought us any hard news? And what, pray tell, is an example of these non-newsy questions? Let's look to that bastion of journalistic heraldry, the New Republic, for an answer. Jon Chait, you have any examples of "unhinged rants" from this woman?
Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there...It's outrageous.
We should all be so "unhinged" and ask such questions.
I'm not surprised the lap dogs in the media turned on Helen Thomas so viciously. However, I was completely surprised to see Dana Milbank was the rare critic who had the decency to write:
[T]he White House press corps will be diminished without Helen front and center, and not only because she was in that job before the current president was born. She brought a ferocity to her questioning that has eluded too many in subsequent generations. At a time when others were getting cozy with sources, her crabby, unrelenting hostility was refreshing.
Helen's flippant comment was wrong, but her career-ending gaffe hardly qualifies as a footnote in a distinguished half-century career of asking the right questions. Just to pick one of literally hundreds of times: Helen was right when she called out Tony Snow about the American complicity in Lebanon's destruction. When the Israelis indiscriminately bombed Lebanon, the US could have stopped the carnage, but chose not to. How unusual. Southern Lebanon is still littered with land mines from the Israeli occupation. Even though landmines are rejected by every civilized country in the world. Yes, I know that Israel and the US are not in that group. I guess that makes me an "unhinged" and "rabid" fanatic.
Oh well. At least I'm not spouting "crazy" things like Helen Thomas, calling the Israeli Occupation "tyrannical" and comparing the collective punishment of people in an "open-aired prison" to the ghettos of Poland. Whoops. That wasn't Helen Thomas. That is the kind of stuff you read in Ha'aretz. Damn those rabid, ranting, polemicists. If the anti-Semites at Ha'aretz hate Israel so much why don't they go back where they came from?