Thomas Ruins Her Legacy

If only Helen Thomas had retired just a couple weeks earlier, then we could remember her for her legendarily combative presidential interrogations, muses Howard Kurtz. But after her “get the hell out of Israel” rant, we’re left instead with today’s column in the Washington Post titled “Helen Thomas, Tarnished Icon,” in which a host of detractors pile on. “She’s always said crazy stuff,” scoffs Jonah Goldberg, while an Atlantic reporter criticizes her for offering “the official Hamas position.”

Another writer says Thomas has always been a “passionate hater of Israel,” and a CNN cameraman now recalls her saying “thank God for Hezbollah” after Israel’s war with Lebanon in 2002. But Dana Milbank will miss her. “At a time when others were getting cozy with sources, her crabby, unrelenting hostility was refreshing,” he writes in the Washington Post. Hopefully more press corps reporters share her opinion “that anybody standing on that podium should be regarded with skepticism.” (More Helen Thomas stories.)