Dana Milbank’s decent and reasonable column about Helen Thomas still admits a hell of a lot:
She brought a ferocity to her questioning that has eluded too many in subsequent generations. At a time when others were getting cozy with sources, her crabby, unrelenting hostility was refreshing.
Translation: nobody else will ask hard questions like Helen, and she did it mainly out of personal animosity.
Milbank’s take on Thomas is consistent with the way she’s been treated for years. She was barely tolerated at the White House, mainly because she had been around forever. She got the full-on crazy aunt treatment from colleagues. Hardly anyone read her column, and fewer still cared what she wrote.
Like a lot of old people in DC, her institution was all she had, so her parting is bittersweet. But, overall, I’m glad to see her go. In the past few years, she functioned as the White House press corps’ token journalist. The supersoakers and tire swingers used Helen’s tough questions as evidence that their institution wasn’t composed entirely of fawning idolaters. Her parting removes one of the last tiny fig leaves covering their gross incompetence.
Ash Can
@mistermix: That’s an interesting take on the situation. It makes me wonder if at least a few of the WH press princesses now will attempt to fill the tough-questions void by asking their own “tough” questions — and promptly get their ears pinned back in highly entertaining fashion, since they don’t have anywhere near the acumen for smart questions that Thomas had.
Brien Jackson
I honestly don’t get this, Thomas didn’t ask “tough” questions, she asked bellicose, confrontational questions. Which was fine for an entertainment value, but had basically no other value because they made her easy to laugh off (“ah, there goes crazy old Helen”) and move away from whatever it was she asked with a patronizing answer and a knowing wink to the other reporters.
Violet
I’ve said this before in other threads here, but there should be no White House Press Corps, not in its current form. There should be people who have the necessary credentials to cover the White House, and any time there is a briefing, names of all credentialed people who are present should go into a hat and be randomly drawn. Not everyone gets in, and seating charts are made according to the order names were drawn.
Non DC-based journalists should be given the chance to get White House press credentials, and if they happen to be in town, should be allowed to put their name in the hat to attend a briefing. Then they’re equal to any other reporter in the room and have just as good a chance to be called on as anyone else.
This would challenge the White House because they’d be getting questions from reporters based outside DC. It would help the American people to have reporters reflecting their local issues getting to ask a question, and it would challenge the White House press corps because they’d get to see what real reporters do.
This whole concept of having an official White House Correspondents Association and their obsession with protocol is revolting:
sherifffruitfly
Surely her unveiled hatred of Jews puts all of her hard questions about Afghanistan and such in a different light.
Of course we should be leaving Iraq and Afghanistan. But advocating for that based upon Jew-hatred is a very different thing.
stuckinred
@Violet: “The people are revolting!”
zorro
the gay blade
cleek
@sherifffruitfly:
hatred of Jews ?
where did she say she hated the Jews ?
kay
@Brien Jackson:
I agree, Brien. Worse, I think she relished that role. It isn’t how forceful the delivery is, or how many times you ask the same question. The measure is what the answers reveal. It cannot be about the individual asking the question.
Bush patronized her and Obama did too. She got a ceremonial front seat, but she wasn’t really at the table. There has to be a better way to go about this.
Egilsson
She should have retired 10 years ago. Too many of these really really old people are hanging on way to long.
Poopyman
@kay:
There is, but it’s contrary to the interests of both the press corps and whichever -party- group is currently in power, so nothing will change.
I keep getting called a pessimist for just being realistic.
El Cid
Time was when Sam Donaldson was praised and admired as a big, tuff-guy, blunt speaking good ol’ fashioned journalist because he did things like yell questions to President Reagan as the old dodderhead ran into a helicopter.
Helen Thomas, though, is a crabby old lady who just barked out stuff due to weird personality issues.
Brien Jackson
@kay:
Exactly; it’s not about what you ask, it’s about the answer you pull out. And part of that is making the person being interviewed feel comfortable.
People give Katie Couric a lot of crap, but her interview with Palin (and Gibson’s too, for that matter) was masterful in this respect. There was no Russertian, confrontation with some superficially embarrassing sound-byte or factoid, just polite questions that required Palin to answer at some length, which of course proved for all to see that she was totally clueless. When’s the last time Thomas did anything like that?
John Cole
@cleek: Oh, by the end of next week, she’ll have served as a guard at Bergen-Belsen. That is why I keep pushing back against the people spewing bullshit about what she said.
kay
I’d just like to add, because it can’t be said enough, that conservatives are completely hypocritical on this, as they are on nearly everything else.
That Ari Fleisher objects when a offensive statement is directed to his group makes me laugh. He, and the rest of conservatism, have no problem at all when the people who agree with them demonize and savage whole segments of the electorate.
Taking offense there is “playing the race card” or being a “feminazi”. The moment their personal ox gets gored, they’re calling for resignations. It’s pure bullshit, and typically self-centered.
Liberals at least have some measure of consistency on this. Rush Limbaugh is completely credible among conservatives, evidenced by the FACT that he hosted sitting members of the Bush Administration, and he’s a vicious divisive bigot. Not a word from conservatives when Limbaugh savages minorities.
Scott
I just wish we’d start applying the Helen Thomas standard on the rest of the media. If you say fucked up shit, you lose your job — no exceptions. Bye, Pat Buchanan. Bye, Pat Robertson. Bye, Judith Miller’s editors. Bye, Beck and Limbaugh and Dowd and Douthat and Broder and Nedra Pickler and Joe Klein and O’Reilly and Hannity and Jake Tapper and Liz Cheney and the rest of the Media Fuckosphere.
But no, can’t do that.
Maude
@kay:
Violet has this right.
The WHPC is insular, paid too much and blissfully ignorant.
And it’s always about them.
We need reporters.
I am tired of all the attention getting.
arguingwithsignposts
@kay:
@Brien Jackson:
Anyone who thinks they’re going to get a straight answer to anything out of the White House briefing room is huffing glue. Would you rather HT’s bellicose questions, or the questions that usually get asked about “is the president projecting enough butt-hurt about the oilpocalypse”?
I also second Violet’s lottery system for WH briefings. Or have them submit questions in writing and have someone draw the questions out of a hat. Remember it was a HuffPo blogger who asked one of the best questions from a very early presidential press conference.
FWIW, we used to run HT’s columns at my college newspaper in the 80s (when she was with UPI). Even then, she was long-winded and sometimes didn’t appear to be quite all there. We inevitably had to trim her copy to fit a much smaller op-ed space.
Michael
@Egilsson:
Make that 25. It wasn’t like she was actually doing anything.
kay
@Brien Jackson:
I think Rachel Maddow is the best interviewer on television. She’s really, really good. They don’t even know they’re falling off a cliff, and she does that with fair questions. She did the work ahead of time, not guessing how they might respond, but crafting the question to elicit a real response. She has a fairly elaborate set-up, where she gets them to agree with certain basic facts. I’d love to give her an hour and see what she did with it.
I don’t think this is a learned skill with her: I think it comes from a good place. She’s sincere in wanting an answer.
kay
@arguingwithsignposts:
I agree. It’s a horrible forum. But she’s supposed to work within that. Either get good at that or pick a different one.
Joey Maloney
Oh, save me. Someone on NPR is interviewing Sally Quinn, at excruciating length, about Helen Thomas’ legacy. The word “legend” is appearing repeatedly.
Ash Can
@El Cid: Nicely done. The undercurrent of ageism and sexism in all the piling-on is chapping me, and you nailed this perfectly. I bow to your snark-fu.
drkrick
It’s just a shame when someone in that position doesn’t have a person in their life who can convince them to get off the stage before this kind of thing happens. It reminds me of Willie Mays in the ’73 World Series or Sammy Baugh claiming a few years before he died that the Redskins threw an NFL championship game to the Bears because they didn’t like the owner (Sammy went into “seclusion” immediately thereafter – just a little too late).
Michael
Given the usefulness of the Helen Thomas seat over the years, I think we should give it to Bulldog Gannon. He could even ask the same sort of questions he asked Bush, but get different responses.
For example, you could have this query:
The high comedy of the loud clapping from wingnut world while they ran off even more of the middle electorate would be a delight to behold.
Mr Furious
@John Cole: I got your back on this one, John.
Was Thomas abrasive? Sure. Was this latest statement inartful or objectionable? Absolutely. Is it a cut and dried revelation into Helen Thomas’ secret desire to continue Hitler’s work? Fuck no.
This was a railroad job.
She made life inconvenient for her subjects and stood in the way of her colleagues. This was a convenient excuse to shuffle her offstage.
She’s certainly lost something off her fastball, and was probably overdue for retirement, but this was a pile on of embarrassing proportion. The sight of her supposed colleagues measuring their dicks over her empty chair is disgusting, and so was Gibbs over-the-top condemnation of her yesterday.
Funny thing is, he would NEVER have had the balls to do it if she was sitting there.
Fuck all of them.
MattF
The problem with Helen Thomas is that her behavior was just part of the game. There’s an effective division of labor in the commentariat– respectable opinions are voiced by respectable people, and crazy opinions are voiced by crazy people. This makes it easy to tell the difference: if you hear an opinion that’s shouted by a batty old lady, it shouldn’t be taken seriously.
It doesn’t actually have to be this way. For example, once upon a time one could hear left-wing opinions on TeeVee from people wearing suits and ties. But that was then…
shortstop
I think it’s both — and that’s as it should be. The lack of sincerity, seriousnness and innate analytical skill in the press corps rightly galls us, but almost as appalling is the idea that anyone can do the job and that there’s no heavy lifting to be done constantly honing one’s interviewing skills. Maddow has both the basic equipment and the willingness to work hard.
Joey Maloney
@Brien Jackson:
Off-point, but I disagree with you on this one. They were pathetic softball questions meant to envelop Palin in a pink-marshmallow fluffy blanket of media slobbery cosseting.
The one thing neither Couric or Gibson counted on was for her to be even more ignorant and incoherent than Captain Bunnypants, and completely lacking in even his bizarre dog-whistled folk-bullshit charm.
On the other hand, Rachel Maddow is well on the way to becoming this generation’s Mike Wallace. What she does looks so easy and unthreatening that everybody thinks, geez, I could walk all over her, not like those other idiots she’s filleting. And they don’t even notice the knife sliding between their ribs until they feel their blood pressure crashing.
Emma
You know, we deserve the press we have. All of us.
By all means let’s pile on the “crazy” lady. Demonize her. Hey, she asked abrasive questions and said something that irritated AIPAC. Let’s make it sound that instead of being a commonly held opinion (get the israelis out of the Palestinian’s land) she meant let’s send all the jews to the ovens. By all means.
And El Cid: Thank you.
Joey Maloney
Let’s make it sound that instead of being a commonly held opinion (get the israelis out of the Palestinian’s land)
But that’s not what I heard her to be saying. She was saying, out of Palestine which is what the entirety of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean was called until 1948. I heard “U.S. out of North America!” and I’m pretty sure that’s what most everyone else did, too, and why the giant spaz-out.
JGabriel
Ash Can:
You mean, like: “Obama: Muslim or Muslim-lover?”
.
Onyx
What is really annoying me about this situation is the attacks on Thomas coming from the left on places like Kos. Really, what she said was a stupid remark to make but people are acting like she said “They should go back to the ovens or the showers…”
I’ve had several Native American friends that, with the assistance of a few drinks, would go on tirades about “Whites should get off our land, they’ve done nothing but screw both us and the land over since they got here.” and if you asked them where they should go the usual response was “I don’t care, they can go back to England or wherever they came from.”
If the same people from the left that are jumping all over Thomas heard a NA say something like that, do you think they’d be jumping all over them? No freaking way. They’d empathize with the plight of the NAs who were run off their lands and herded in to ghettos on the worst lands in the country which their conquerers didn’t want.
liberal
@Brien Jackson:
IMHO we need to move away from this emphasis on interviews and toward an IF Stone model of journalism where one parses documents, actions, etc.
liberal
@MattF:
When was that?
liberal
@arguingwithsignposts:
Heh.
jurassicpork
American Zen‘s Mike Flannigan weighs in on the Redoubtable Thomas and the rank hypocrisy it’s unleashed in the MSM. And he ain’t too kind toward his colleagues.
Keith G
@kay:
If you remember, during the last part of GWB she was moved to the back for a bit. I thinks it was because of her “illegal war” line of questioning.
But now that she is an official racist (as some say), we can forget all that. So now, she is just an old useless woman.
My, we suck.
Ash Can
@JGabriel: Wouldn’t that be fun? I’d love it. I mean, it wouldn’t come out in those exact words, but you just know some of these useless boobs would come out with a few real prizes (the very first press conference comes to mind), and utter hilarity would ensue (again).
eemom
OMFG. Again with the Helen Thomas. Again with the what did she mean by “Palestine.” Were all those words yesterday uttered all for naught?
The dialogue here often reminds me of what Ethel Mertz said upon entering the Ricardos’ apartment to find them arguing about Lucy wanting to be in the show: “They’re always showing the same old movie on this channel.”
But Brien and Kay are right. Also too.
MattF
@liberal
I should say, ‘left-wing by current standards’. Anyhow, 60’s and 70’s– union officials, even soshalists, heaven forfend. Long ago, but I don’t think it’s a false memory implanted through my bodily orifices by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Bulworth
That’s gold.
Poopyman
Heh. Anyone notice that today’s the anniversary of the attack on the Liberty? June 8, 1967.
Steeplejack
@Poopyman:
Anti-Semite!
Emma
Joey: I think we all heard what we are primed to hear. I’m not primed to hear criticism of Israel as criticism of the jews in general and certainly not as antisemitic. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a culture where it wasn’t a political hot potato.
Don’t misunderstand, I think her phrasing was stupid and careless and I do think her Lebanese ancestry gives her a particular take on events in Palestine. She tripped a hidden wire.
Poopyman
@Steeplejack:
“A day that will live in infamy!”
No, that’s not right. Hmmmm.
“Remember, remember, the 5th of November”
No, not that either. Well then! I guess we’ll just forget it ever happened! (Dusts off hands, exits stage left.)
Mark
@Onyx –
Go back three threads where I discuss the plight of aboriginal people in Canada. I don’t know that sympathy is exactly what you’d call the response.
Also, there’s a difference between American-born Helen Thomas telling you about oppression and a native american telling you the same. Her parents were Lebanese christians, a group that has its own issues with oppressing a muslim population. Native Americans, on the other hand, have a pretty straightforward history of being crushed by white people.
Keith G
BTW, Sir Paul McCartney should really send Helen a thank you note.
wilfred
I don’t get this, actually. How about some examples of the difference using, say, Palestine, as the subject, which she often did.
She asked Obama, for instance, whether there were any countries in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, this after he was going on about Iran.
Tough or bellicose?
jayjaybear
McCartney’s (hilarious) joke was a one-day wonder everywhere but Free Republic and RedState. Acting like Helen Thomas sucked all the oxygen away from the potential McCartneyflagration is really kind of silly.
Michael
The pundit world wants to talk about Helen Thomas, but when you have the utterly psychotic wife of a US Supreme Court justice saying stuff like this, I hear a lot of silence:
http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/virgina-thomas-democrats-tyranny/2010/05/29/id/360531
She’s looking to have a Mary Todd Lincoln style breakdown sometime in the next two years, I suspect. She’s genuinely unhinged. He’s probably as bad in his own silent, worthless way, but she’s even worse. I suspect it is about spending so much time around people who silently disapprove of her marriage choice but love what he says as their shill.
wilfred
@Poopyman:
Try here:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/
Read the Gallo letter.
BDeevDad
The comments just showed her idiocy. There are many more Israelis that come from Middle Eastern countries than Europe (excluding Russia). And to use Germany and Poland as examples is the apex of stupid. There are far fewer Israelis who can trace their roots back to those countries because there were fewer Jews who could immigrate from there for obvious reasons.
kay
@wilfred:
She could begin with a statement: “Israel has nuclear weapons”.
Asking it that coy way makes a point to the careful listener and someone who has considered it would recognize what she’s trying to do, but it also makes it completely easy to give a non-answer.
The question isn’t the point. Her job is to get a factual answer. She’s working to divine motive, “are there any other….” but she didn’t lay the factual groundwork for that. That indicates to the listener that she has made up her mind.
Do you see what I mean? She can’t go the policy. She has to let the facts do that.
kay
@wilfred:
I’m not going to trust her, wilfred, with that question. There’s a whole host of unspoken assumptions behind it. Those are obvious to you, but if they are, that’s a problem.
Try to take away what you know, or think you know, and put yourself in the position of the people she is (ostensibly) trying to inform.
She can’t lead with her conclusion.
wilfred
@kay:
I disagree. For one thing a lot of people have no idea whether or not a country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons and given the context of Obama’s remarks, calling at one point for a nuke free region, it made sense to ask a question like that; it did to me, at least.
There’s an expression in Arabic that amounts to: No answer is itself an answer. Obama’s evasiveness said a lot.
Saying something like “Israel has nuclear weapons” would have given: ‘Well, Helen, they neither confirm nor deny that, as you know, etc., etc.”
What most people don’t understand is that Helen was a muckraker; we won’t hear a tough question on the Middle East for a long time.
El Cid
@BDeevDad: Actually, the great majority of Israeli Jews (around 70%) were born in Israel (i.e., the father born there), the next greatest and much smaller portion migrated from Europe (including the former USSR, Poland, and Romania), the remaining last portion from Asian and Arab nations. Per the Israeli Census.
Of those born in Israel, a large majority count their area of origin (again, the father’s origin) as Europe, the Americas, and Oceania (about 20%), next those of Moroccan origin (~8%) (and the former USSR (~ 6%) and Poland and Romania (~ 7%). Though there are quite huge other chunks originating in Iraq (~4%) and Yemen (~ 3%).
Phoebe
@Joey Maloney: I disagree with you on the Couric interview. Yes, it was a softball interview, or Palin wouldn’t have done it, but when Palin started flailing, Katie remained totally calm and asked relevant follow up questions that sounded reasonable [which is why it’s hilarious that Palin tries to characterize them as “gotcha”] but totally honed in on the weak parts. Perfection.
Gibson, on the other hand, should have fallen through the trapdoor when he wimped out and told her what the Bush Doctrine was. Too chivalrous. But it did provide me with my favorite Palin quote: “In what sense, Charlie?” which still inserts itself into many of my conversations, to the bafflement of all.
Nellcote
So Fox will probably get her seat. How is that better?
Keith G
@jayjaybear: Thank you. I hit my goal.
El Cid
@Phoebe: C’mon. Asking someone what newspapers they read is totally a hostile, gotcha question, and should never have been asked by an objective reporter to the Commander In Chief of the Alaska National Guard.
kay
@wilfred:
Obama’s never going to fall for that. He’s never going to answer her question with a list of countries that have nuclear weapons. Why should he? He didn’t agree to her unspoken premise. He has an easy out. The best answer she’s ever going to get to that question is “yes”. That puts her right where she started.
That it doesn’t work makes me think she’s asking a question to state her conclusion. You’re familiar with that, in regular dialogue with people. You’re going to resist a premise behind a question, particularly if you’re a politician.
She has to start from “I don’t know the answer”, every time.
cmorenc
@Brien Jackson
Many years ago, I worked for one long session of my state legislature at a nonpolitical staff support level which nonetheless gave me frequent personal access to the floor of both houses while in session, and to many of the members. One thing I do vividly remember is that there were a handful of legislators prone to making vividly colorful, pointedly tough points and questions about matters before the body – and how many of them were regarded by other representatives (or Senators) as entertaining, ineffectual “crazy uncle” buffoons. A couple of them were, however respected for their ability to work effectively behind the scenes to get things done, quite apart from their occasional public on-floor displays.
IMHO there’s an analogous principle at work with reporters and press conferences – much of it is for show for both the politician conducting the conference, and the reporters asking questions, while the real work of digging out facts and true thinking and positions and dynamics of the actors involved in any issue is done off-camera, outside press conferences. Press conferences are about generating brief video or sound bytes, not primarily digging out information, though occasionally some nuggets do get presented at these conferences (which are almost always equally available outside the conference, either beforehand or very quickly afterward).
liberal
@BDeevDad:
If you define someone born in Israel as coing from a ME country, yes. If you define someone with European ancestry as “coming from” Europe, then that’s questionable—do you have a cite? Furthermore, why would you exclude Russia—the last I checked, Jews from Russia came from European Russia. Or most of them anyway.
Obviously so? Are you implying there was no Jewish migration from Europe before the 1940s?
Edit: I see El Cid already answered. I tried looking at the numbers from the similar post he (she? :-) ) made in a previous thread, but due to time restrictions…
kay
@wilfred:
I guess to me, wilfred, the look of minor somewhat bitter satisfaction she gets when she gets a politician to (easily) evade her question is just futile. I’m impatient with that. What is she working to reveal? I don’t know. His character? Bias in policy? That no one will answer this “question”? I don’t really see that as a ‘win” for anyone.
While I see the value of questions that are really statements, in terms of drawing attention to an issue, I don’t trust that method.
liberal
@kay:
Uh, because it points out the utter hypocrisy of US policy towards Iranian enrichment efforts?
wilfred
@kay:
I understand, sure. But for many of us Helen is a kind of hero. You see, when you have no other voice all you can do sometimes is point out hypocrisy – to Muslims a very big sin, indeed. We, Arabs and Muslims, know the answers to the questions we ask – we want others to start asking the questions themselves.
Of course it was futile. It will remain so until it’s not. In the meantime, Helen tried to speak truth to power; she will be missed.
kay
@liberal:
She has to give him the benefit of not being an idiot. Since she’s not stupid, and she’s not doing that, it’s not a “real” question.
Have you ever been in any kind of class where someone would ask a question that was not a question? They were either letting the group know something about the person asking the question (usually, that they’re smart) or stating some conclusion they had come to?
Did you feel manipulated? As if the whole exercise was a bit of a sham?
cmorenc
@wilfred: It’s worth recalling that a few hundred years ago, the people assigned to perform the role of “speaking truth to power” were the court jesters. Their impunity to sanction depended on the willful assumption by those with actual power at the Court, especially the monarch, that the jester was merely an entertaining fool who didn’t need to be taken seriously, despite some occasional biting wit. To be taken seriously, you had to be someone who carefully phrased your points and ideas to not offend powerful members of the court.
Some things haven’t changed nearly enough in over 500 years, have they?
kay
@wilfred:
Absolutely. I get that. But it’s too insular. She reminds me of anti-abortion people, with the singularity of focus that is exclusionary. If you don’t know that there is a move afoot within anti-abortion ranks to redefine “person” you don’t know the whole underlying premise of their question about the 14th amendment. You’re thinking “why the fuck is steam coming out of her ears about the 14th amendment?” President Bush spoke to them a lot, in a sort of code.
Brien Jackson
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75373/helen-thomas-revisionism
What Chait said.
El Cid
@kay: It doesn’t have to be a ‘real’ question. When the United States is being formally utterly dishonest about the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons, it is indeed a national and internationally significant matter to expose an individual American President for that same base dishonesty.
It isn’t some judgment call on a reporter’s part to pre-determine whether or not a U.S. policymaker will openly lie or ignore a basic, completely relevant question upon which a discussion of current policy hugely relates.
It’s simply not okay to let governing U.S. figures perpetuate a shameful and hypocritical dishonest while calling for international actions based supposedly on purely honorable motives and universally shared concerns. Demonstrating that a particular governing official involved in foreign policy — and certainly Obama is — maintain a rigid dishonest and hypocrisy is certainly worthy of a professional journalist.
Good lord, what kind of journalist would listen to a discussion of nuclear weapons issues in the Middle East and choose not to try to put officials on record wrt Israeli nuclear arms?
BDeevDad
@liberal: 50% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim or non-Ashkenazic Jews. That means at least 50% are not of Eastern-European descent, let alone Germany and Poland. Where are they supposed to go?
No, I’m saying the assumption that most Jews in Israel are descendants of German and Polish Holocaust survivors is idiotic.
Keith G
@BDeevDad:
I am wondering who said they had to go anywhere?
DougW
Crazy she may have been, but she was one classy lady. Reading her column over the years has been as astonishing for her breadth of knowledge and experience as it has been for her sometimes unique analysis and conclusions.
She is an old school journalist. I’m sad that her record ends here on such a bad note, there is no one in the whpc that deserves so much as to sit in that front row with her.
I can’t defend her statement regarding Israel and “Palestine”, but it is clear that the United States has given Israel too much, and they are taking advantage of our generosity and support.
This whole episode has gotten nobody anywhere. It’s really sad.
Boney Baloney
“Hey, this seat taken, Dan?”
“Helen. No. Nobody sitting there.”
“I have to say, I never expected to drop the soap like that. Well, you know.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“How soon we forget. A forged copy of a real document? And now you play Windows Solitaire all day? I’m trying to empathize with your dumb ass.”
“Don’t compare yourself with me, ma’am.”
“Oh don’t start. I have panty girdles older than you. You got your big break jumping the right way on the official story in Dealy Plaza, so don’t even start. They used you and flushed you and half the J-school students in America aren’t even sure you’re still alive, okay, so shove it.”
“…Is Ariel Sharon still alive, by the way?”
“Sure. Carrots are alive. Mushrooms are alive. No, but I wouldn’t bet a buffalo nickle. What’s that you’re having? Bartender, hit him again and the same for me.”
“You have to admit, you screwed the pooch.”
“Oh, I’m old and tired of the shit. They want me to whip myself in public. They can kiss my ass. Cheers.”
“Cheers.”