Bloodthirsty Liberal

Of course! Why didn’t we see this before?

There she goes again.

That was the eye-rolling reaction in the White House pressroom when Helen Thomas would go off on one of her rants about the Middle East. She had been there for so long, was so admired by female journalists, was such a curmudgeonly character, that she was regarded as everyone’s eccentric aunt.

Jew hatred? Check. Crowds of arrogant intellectuals sitting in the pews? Check. Eccentric aunt/uncle in the attic? Check.

But that’s not how she was seen by much of the country, which still viewed her as the groundbreaking correspondent she once was, not the cranky columnist she had become. So when Aunt Helen snapped that Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” — and go back to Germany, among other places — many onlookers were stunned.

Too bad when we heard Reverend Wright we weren’t quite stunned enough. Or was that because the media declined to fully investigate and publish his odious remarks? Because they covered for the fact that Obama had been in his church, weekly, for twenty years?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that she was a member in good standing of a tightly knit club that refused to question why a woman whose main job seemed to be to harangue press secretaries and presidents deserved a front-row seat in the briefing room. Only the furor that followed a chance encounter with a rabbi armed with a video camera prompted the 89-year-old Thomas to retire last week.

Journalists, especially those who spend a great deal of time together, don’t usually turn on each other. If Thomas was spewing bias and bile, the reasoning went, what was the harm?

Exactly. That is exactly how they think. They have tremendous power, but use it with loosey-goosey rules like little kids in a clubhouse. When you call them on it, they are shocked and offended. Are you questioning their judgment? Their professionalism!

And, true to form, the writer launches into a long defense of Helen Thomas. But I won’t quote it here. He doesn’t want his buddies to stop talking to him.

To his credit, he notes the hatred that the Rabbi has been subjected to for releasing his video, both from the general public and from members of the press:

Nesenoff also says “there are individuals within the media” who are “pursuing an agenda,” though he declines to identify them. (Critics have derided him for portraying a stereotypical Mexican with a bad accent in a video on his Web site, which the rabbi dismisses as a harmless Purim skit.) Had they called, Nesenoff says, he would have explained that he has founded an anti-bias task force, consulted for the Justice Department in the Denny’s restaurant discrimination case and spoken with Mel Gibson about his drunken, anti-Semitic rant.

To those who say he wound up infringing on Thomas’s freedom of speech, Nesenoff says that she had a public platform “for 60 years. I had it for two minutes, and I shared my two minutes with her. It was specifically her freedom of speech that caused this problem.”

- Aggie