God Only Knows

If you missed the interview with Helen Thomas on yesterday's Hugh Hewitt show, you missed a doozy. I urge you to go and read the transcript at Radioblogger immediately. Great stuff. I'll try to post more on this later, but for now will leave you with one of my favorite parts of the exchange, about halfway through, when Helen apparently forgets who she's talking to:

HT: Who am I talking to?

HH: Hugh Hewitt.

HT: Am I talking to a journalist?

HH: Yes. Yes, for a long time. I'm just curious about what's gone wrong...

HT: Tell me about your career. What have you really done?

HH: Well, it's not nearly as impressive as you.

HT: Where did...yes, it's...it's very important to me. Where did you work?

HH: PBS for ten years.

HT: PBS?

HH: Yes.

HT: Well, that's a good credential.

HH: There you have it. See? I'm...

HT: But then you decided to switch over?

HH: To switch over to what?

HT: God knows what you are.

UPDATE: Hugh's interview with Thomas was refreshing because it finally confirmed what many have suspected about her for years. She's unapologetically liberal, has voted Democratic for years (likely back to FDR's first term), and she despises the Bush administration. Of course she went out of the way to say that these views in no way influenced her reporting over the years. And perhaps they didn't. But let us be the judge of that. Just quit pretending that you're some impartial observer whose political leanings are not to be disclosed publicly for fear of somehow soiling your sacred reputation for objectivity.

The other revelation was how easily Thomas fell back into the simplistic sort of arguments (that have been refuted over and over again) that you would expect to hear from your typical MoveOn.orger:

HT: Look. I take everything that he does with a grain of salt, because I've already seen...I think he was wrong to take us into the war...

HH: Do you think he lied to us about that?

HT: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Where are the ties...

HH: That's a question to a question.

HT: ...where are the ties to al Qaeda?

HH: Do you think he lied to us about that?

HT: I think he's still looking for the weapons of mass destruction. Are you?

HH: But do you...do you think...

HT: Do you care whether...do you care whether a president says there are weapons of mass destruction that can destroy you, destroy us in 45 minutes?

HH: But Helen, did you think that he knew going in that they weren't there?

HT: Yes.

HH: And so you do think he lied going it? He deceived us all?

HT: I think that he had...there were facts, they've cherry picked the facts, they wanted a war.

And then there was this strange attempt to play the Chicken Hawk card:

HH: No, but Helen, before I let you go, I want to know why do you think Iraq is worse off today than it was four years ago? What was Saddam doing to his people?

HT: Should they be the grateful dead? [ This would have been a good time for Hugh to go with a Jerry Garcia joke.] A hundred thousand dead? Wounded? Should all of the people we have killed, Americans, dead? Should they be happy? I mean, what are you talking about? Did you enlist?

HH: I'm asking...

HT: Are you going to be recruited?

Answer the question, Mr. Hewitt. Are you going to be recruited or not?

Something tells me that this was the first and last appearance by Helen Thomas on the Hugh Hewitt Show. (sigh) I miss her already.