You see, Howie started to quietly ask around about assisted living facilities for Helen back when she really, to his addled mind, really went off the rails, being so critical of Bush and all.  It was “biased,” and worse, rude to question Bush’s motivations for the Iraq War in those days, and reality apparently hasn’t yet crept into Kurtz’s featherweight mind to see that Helen was, as usual, right and he was, well, Bill Kristol’s even uglier twin of wrongness.  He even manages to devote a paragraph or so to the rank effrontery of her writing a book describing sycophantic, Washington-centric nincompoops like himself, in the title, as, “Watchdogs of Democracy?” That made Kurtz think, and his article makes abundantly clear that he found the experience unpleasant.  Why he would reveal this to his long-suffering readers is a mystery.  The column is so boring, offensive, and insulting that I’m loathe to bore readers with very much of it, but just to show you why in a rational world Howie Kurtz would be embarrassed to go outside, here’s a bit….

Since Thomas was a columnist, she had every right to her opinions — even if her view was that Jews should be banished from Israel. But she didn’t have a perpetual right to a newspaper column or a White House pressroom seat. Hearst bears some responsibility for keeping Thomas on as her behavior grew more disturbing. It’s not that a pro-Israel press corps drove her out; it’s that Thomas could not defend her remarks, and indeed apologized for them.

Ah, I see.  So after Fox News gets her seat objectivity will be returned to the White House Press Room?  Better yet, look at the cheesy way Kurtz looks at stupid, meaningless perks like front row seats as some big deal…  as John Stewart hilariously pointed out, “Are you rushing a sorority?”  Still, Kurtz must be acutely familiar with the uncertainty of employment in the industry he’s helped to discredit and destroy, so treating Thomas’ job as something the mean girls could take away showed they all meant business, Kurtz obviously included.  Rules must be followed.

All this might have been avoided had Helen’s friends gently suggested it was time to retire. But here the insular nature of Beltway life clearly came into play. Those who were accustomed to seeing Thomas around town regarded her as one of Washington’s harmless gadflies, perhaps forgetting that she still had access to a powerful megaphone.

There were exceptions — Slate’s Jack Shafer and the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait have noted that Thomas was asking “wildly inappropriate” questions, as Chait put it, but the story line got no traction, even when the late White House spokesman Tony Snow accused her of offering “the Hezbollah view.”

Can you imagine, bringing in Tony Snow to argue that somebody was inappropriately liberal?  Wasn’t Michael Savage available?  The most hilarious part is that Kurtz still clings to the idea that Thomas somehow represented the “establishment.”  Come on.  The establishment had long since moved on into stenography and incestuous hanky-panky, and the problem with Helen was that she made them look like credulous, ass-kissing dimwits, daily.  But wait, there’s this…

Thomas, meanwhile, positioned herself as the truth-telling alternative to Washington’s weenies. Her 2007 book was titled “Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public.” In a March interview with Vice magazine, she said — with some justification — that “everyone rolled over and played dead” during the run-up to the Iraq war. Thomas added, rather conspiratorially, that she was “sure the big communications corporations got orders from on high. So they played ball.”

And?  Howie never explains, thank god.  The article was excruciating enough, but the thought that he still has a job and Helen doesn’t looks pretty bad for the future of journalism, on whose grave ol’ Howie is dancing.

The CIA and the Obama Administration think tomorrow would be better; oh, make that next week.  After all, there is the possibility that over the holiday weekend the fireworks and barbecues wherein Americans celebrate their special place in the world will make everybody so bloated and hung over that finding out about having killed a hundred or so people, and sticking a dizzying array of different things up their butts in the process, will seem kind of tiresome and boring.   It’s as good a bet as any.  Curiously, though, in an administration that has now slavishly copied  both the media management and nearly all the policies of its once-reviled predecessor, it didn’t just pick the usual Friday night “one cheek sneak,” as Sam Seder memorably and accurately called it, to let this silent but deadly story fill the room with its aroma, and run.  It’s the dog that didn’t, uh, bark.

Of course, any mystery surrounding this aberration quickly evaporates when one reads the documents in question, even in the most cursory fashion, and minus the pictures.  ”Natural” deaths seem to abound for otherwise healthy 20-somethings, shocking and frankly repulsive descriptions of the most reprehensible violations of human dignity, and a deep sexual perversions run through it all like the sewage in the streets of Fallujah, and the corpses pile up with only conflicting data and plainly bowdlerized autopsies, written in the bland bureaucratese that gave the banality of evil its name.   What could a red-blooded American serve on the Fourth that wouldn’t lead to unfortunate puns and spoiled appetites over this type of stuff?  Everybody understands their dilemma.  Not while we’re eating, please.

The problem is, of course, that the only people on earth who have any doubt, or even support, such vile behavior committed in their name are Americans…   All the supposed “terrorists” who are supposedly assembling on our shores, and are assuredly going to treat this “news” as the final straw before they nuke us once and for all, already know all about it.  They don’t have the WaPoo in Afghanistan and Fox News is not readily available in Saudi Arabia, so it turns out those potential terrorists are a little smarter than we are, here in the Homeland, about these things.  Besides, we don’t wait for the “bad guys” to be in the right frame of mind before we bomb, kill, or torture them, which they no doubt see as kind of insulting, considering the sensitivity with which we treat those whose opinions we sort of care about here at home, and yet quite often squish, freeze or sodomize those we call “terrorists,”  all the time, even when they’re not the least in the mood.  That sort of thing has just got to rankle, as it takes no great difficulty to imagine.

As Helen Thomas said today of the administration, and appropriately derisively, “the people who promised openness and transparency?”  They’re just waiting for the right moment, Helen.

Naturally, if you read the MSM or watched TV, you’d have missed this priceless moment, which I have to say, in my unprejudiced opinion, was first time I saw President Obama pretty much be an arrogant asshole. Helen, with her uncomfortable truth, cracked the code, and while I suddenly liked my President, whom I supported and continue to support, albeit intermittently these days, a lot less, my crush on Helen only got worse.  So I typed.

Behold the following, which may be slightly better written than Gov. Sanford’s work, but is essentially the same thing.

Dear Ms. Thomas,

Amid the maelstrom over the deeply compromised folks over at the WaPoo and Politico whining about how uppity “bloggers” were taking over the Obama press conferences, it brought a smile to my face that you so ably disrupted the scripted operetta with your question about the torture photos.

As usual, and I don’t mean to insinuate that you do it deliberately, you made your “colleagues” look like the motley peanut gallery of fawning, social-climbing nincompoops that they are.

Thanks again, for reviving for me the fading memory of what journalism was intended to be.

Glad to see you back at your game.

Cocktailhag

Her response?

Kind words- We are being treated like trained seals. helent

Today’s the day.  We should all stand with Helen against torture.  Some seals can’t be trained.