Helen Thomas may finally be getting her comeuppance. The 274-year-old reporter who has covered every president since John Adams is as nasty and shrew-like as they get. Last week she told a rabbi – A RABBI – that the Jews should just “get the Hell out of Palestine”. Thomas picked the Jewish Heritage Month celebration at the White House as the appropriate venue to express her hateful and intolerant views to a religious leader.
I guess she’s gotten away with it for so long that she thinks she can just do whatever she wants with no consequences. She was allowed to heckle President Bush every week. She’s been free to make grandstanding speeches thinly veiled as questions for years. This time, I think she may have taken one step too far.
I went back in the archives and found more of Thomas’ more insensitive statements:
- Last October, she asked President Obama if being President of the United States would interfere with his cotton picking duties.
- In June 1961, she told President John F. Kennedy his New England accent made him sound like “a retarded goat-mule with peanut butter on the roof of his mouth.” When asked what a goat-mule was, she reportedly replied, “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, you sick perverted [expletive deleted]?”
- In a marathon speech at a press conference in May 1941, Thomas said the Franklin D. Roosevelt should “roll his fat, disease-ridden [expletive deleted] back to Juarez with the rest of the STD-infected [expletive deleted x 3].
It will be interesting to see what, if any, reaction the White House has to Helen Thomas’ latest outburst. My guess is that they’re too scared of her to say anything. But then again, they’ve also got to be afraid of further alienating the millions of Jewish registered voters that the Obama administration has already upset with its stance on Israel.
To be fair, I’m trying to look at it from Thomas’ perspective. One the one hand, I think that I’ll say anything I want to, too, when I’m as old as Helen Thomas. On the other hand, I generally don’t want to say things that are racist and hateful, so I think I’ll be OK.
