It’s sad when someone you respect does something stupid to tarnish their entire life’s work. I felt that way when Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) made racially insensitive remarks during a stand-up routine, and I feel that way about Helen Thomas’s comments about Israelis ‘getting the hell out of Palestine” and going back to Poland, Germany, and America. I don’t know what’s in her heart, although I could forgive an outburst of frustration with the Middle East impasse in the context of the flotilla massacre. But I can’t and won’t defend her remarks. Telling Jews to go back to Germany is about as insensitive as you can get. She deserves sharp criticism. But I don’t like to see people piling on like this:

“She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view, and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate,” said CBS correspondent Mark Knoller. “As a columnist she felt totally unbound from any of the normal policies of objectivity that every other reporter in the room felt compelled to abide by, and sometimes her questions were embarrassing to other reporters.”

Is Mark Knoller on the record complaining about James Guckert/Jeff Gannon’s point of view or WorldNetDaily’s Les Kinsolving’s agenda? I have never heard Kinsolving ask a pertinent question, ever. Helen Thomas was a tough questioner. She had a point of view, but she didn’t suck up to anyone. She was Bush’s toughest questioner and she was Obama’s toughest questioner. She embarrassed people who ought to have been embarrassed. The consensus until about two minutes ago was that she was a national treasure. And why? Because she asked tough questions even when she knew the answer would be contemptuous:

In 2002, Thomas asked [Ari] Fleischer: “Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?”

Four years later, Thomas told Fleischer’s successor, Tony Snow, that the United States “could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon” by Israel, but instead had “gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine.” Snow tartly thanked her for “the Hezbollah view.”

God forbid a child of Lebanese immigrants should question the reaction of Israel over a few rocket attacks and kidnappings from the Hezbollah-controlled border region.

During the campaign Israel’s Air Force flew more than 12,000 combat missions, its Navy fired 2,500 shells, and its Army fired over 100,000 shells. Large parts of the Lebanese civilian infrastructure were destroyed, including 400 miles (640 km) of roads, 73 bridges, and 31 other targets such as Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport, ports, water and sewage treatment plants, electrical facilities, 25 fuel stations, 900 commercial structures, up to 350 schools and two hospitals, and 15,000 homes. Some 130,000 more homes were damaged.

There was nothing disproportionate or excessive about that response at all. The mere act of asking about our government’s complicity in that response was ‘giving the Hezbollah view.’

No knowledgeable person thought the tensions at the border were organized or approved by the leadership in Beirut, but bombing the airport was an unassailable act.

Look. Whether you agreed with Israel’s decision to decimate all of Lebanon or not, what is the problem with asking why we are going along with it?

And Helen Thomas wasn’t just a hard-ass on issues related to Israel. She was a pain in the ass of every administration. Isn’t that what we want from a White House press correspondent? When people start complaining about the point of view and agenda of right-wing correspondents then I might be willing to listen. But Thomas had a sterling career until she said something truly stupid. We can condemn her remark without impugning her entire body of work.