Did the Media Fail Helen Thomas By Letting Her Be In the Media?

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   Legendary White House Crone Helen Thomas got herself pushed into retirement finally, at age 89, over a bizarre outburst into arabbi's video cameraabout how the Israeli Jews need to go "back [to] Poland, Germany," etc. Was it the White House press corps' fault for letting the increasingly shrill lady keep yelling her Democratic Underground sermons at whatever WH spokesperson? Maybe!Howard Kurtz, who spins tales of media lore of the past each Monday in hisWashington Postcolumn, today investigates (types his feelings about) the Helen Thomas Scandal. Did you know she has been Very Very Old for at least a decade now, and that nobody read her Hearst column, and nobody read her UPI column in thepreviouscentury, and she was "never known for great writing or breaking stories," and that she was/is an Arab of some kind? Okay, that last part isn't spelled out in Kurtz's column, but it pretty much is, anyway -- because the prankster rabbi who finally kicked Helen down the Backstairs at the White House says people have e-mailed him some super mean anti-Jewish things, such as "Dirty Jew" (which nobody has said since the Nixon Administration?), because of this video-rabbi causing Helen Thomas being forced into retirement at age 89. One Helen Thomas fan even misspelled Hitler's name, which is typical. [ Washington Post ]

• A foosball tournament between the United States and England was a draw, which luckily was not used in any way as a metaphor for the Washington-BP bitch fight over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. [ Fox News / CBS News ]

• Japanese scientists are comically scrambling through the Australian Outback in search of their mysterious space capsule that just plunged back to Earth after visiting an asteroid. Will the Japanese scientists reach the probe before the Aboriginal Tribespeople inside the Woomera military zone? Yes, it turns out, because the scientists just recovered the spacecraft today. But this would've made a very intriguing science-fiction BBC comedy series a laKangaroo Jack, we bet. [ SMH / AP ]