Helen Thomas' Retirement Exposes a Lot

by the Left Coast Rebel

We at the Left Coast Rebel have already touched on the Helen Thomas affair. Due to her 'retirement' today more discussion is due.

To start, a few thoughts:

• Be careful what you ask for, conservatives. Shouldn't many in the 'press' lose their jobs because they are compliant accomplices to the government/media complex? Not due to an incendiary opinion, left/right?
  

• Perhaps we should like our crazy lefties front and center in the White House so-called 'press' corps.

I like to take beltway dogpiles like the Helen Thomas Jewish sentiment and turn it into a truth to power moment. Case in point:

A).

Why does White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs sound like he admits that the WH press corps and the White House are joined at the hip?



"Obviously those remarks do not reflect the opinion, of, I assume certainly the opinion of most of the people in here and certainly not of the administration."

Why would Gibbs even think that he would need to clear both the press and White House on this issue? I think this sheds a little light and perhaps is why the press and White House made such a big deal out of Helen Thomas' statement. The press corps is the White House. The press corps is the government, the press corps is the establishment. Case in point, Helen Thomas' 89th birthday on August 4, 2009, the same birth date as Obama. It doesn't get any cozier than the WH/WH press corps:

B).

White House Correspondents Association's plan on 'punishment' for Helen Thomas. First off, I knew little about the WHCA before and after reading find it in the least abhorrent that such a thing even exists. Butler Shaffer at Lew Rockwell finds the WHCA's treatment of Thomas Orwellian:

Whatever opinion one may hold on Helen Thomas’s comment about the Israelis and Palestine, a more telling point is to be found in some members of the White House Correspondents Association contemplating how best to punish her for her remarks. Punishment? The mainstream media has long been little more than PR flacks for the policies and programs of the political establishment, but rarely do they so openly admit to this role as here.

C).

The fourth estate is dead and camera-wielding fifth-estaters are the future. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has long advocated (and titled a book on) the Army of ubiquitous digital video-cam-donning Davids to bring down the corrupt fourth estate.

A normal citizen wielding a vid-cam, along with ample senility, and perhaps several gin and tonics proved to do the trick with Helen Thomas. Reynolds also took note of San Diego blogger and Tea Partier Leslie Eastman taking advantage of the same theme:

My friend attended a San Diego rally this weekend, at utilized a flip camera to record the 100 or so attendees. There was a San Diego Union Tribune reporter who interviewed me, indicating someone told him only 25 people were there — the number he was originally going to use, until our images proved otherwise.

The post is also a compendium of the 20,000 or so Americans protesting nation-wide this weekend.

Hmm, an army of Davids....