Helen Thomas Forced To Retire - Look At Who Gets To Stay

Today, 89 year old White House correspondent and columnist Helen Thomas was forced into retirement for saying this....once:

"Thomas told a rabbi at a White House event last week that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go back to Germany and Poland.'"

A nasty comment without doubt but it comes from someone with no history of anti-semitism in her years covering 10 Presidents or any of her writings as a columnist after she resigned from reporting when cult leader Sun Myung Moon bought United Press International.  She did apologize for her remark and someone her age finally retiring isn't exactly news.  What is news is that it certainly looks like the retirement was forced, with her agent quitting and speeches she was scheduled to deliver being canceled.

There is no defense for what she said.  The only question that remains is why stop with her?

"We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say." --arguing that it would be better if they were all Christians

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's deaths so much." -on 9/11 widows who have been critical of the Bush administration

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

All of that came from the mouth and writings of Ann Coulter.  Are there any cries for her to retire and shut up?  Well, a little bit over the years (she was fired by MSNBC, The National Review and various newspapers have dropped her column) but she's still getting paid for speeches, people buy her books, she is a guest on NBC's "Today" show and a regular on Fox Noise.

Then there's the Tea Party Leader, Glenn Beck:

"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. ... No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,' and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, 'Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.' And you know, well, I'm not sure." –responding to the question "What would people do for $50 million?"



"When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh shut up' I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining."

"Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization...And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That's what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing]."

"So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. ... Eugenics. In case you don't know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. ... The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening."

How about him - any condemnations of him from the right?  He off TV now?  Absolutely not.

Then there's this gem from the Leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh:

“To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”

Yep, he's still around too.

Well, surely someone of the advanced age of Patrick Buchanan has been put out to pasture for remarks like these:

Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory." (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)


During the Gulf crisis: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States." (McLaughlin Group, 8/26/90)

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic and genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great courage.... Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." (Guardian, 1/14/92)

Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan's columns have run in the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.

Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York Times, 4/21/87)

Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite protests -- to visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried. At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that they were "Americans first" -- and repeatedly scrawled the phrase "Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews" in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were "victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." (New York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)

No, he's still a regular "analyst" on the progressive and liberal MSNBC news channel.

This isn't about "silencing conservative voices" (and if you consider these people the voices of conservatism, it says a lot about where that movement really is).  It's not about the First Amendment and freedom of speech either - none of them will go to jail for what they say but nothing in the Bill of Rights says certain people have the "right" to be in newspapers or magazines and have programs on TV and radio.

What this is about is that the so-called conservatives dancing about in glee at Helen Thomas being forced into retirement should remember an old saying about people who live in glass houses and what they shouldn't be doing.