Somebody want to get Helen her meds, please?

This woman is older than dirt, and about as senile as Andy Rooney. Last week, Helen Thomas decided to lob some bombs at the 'Sphere:

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued. “Reporters laid down on the job in the run up to this [the Iraq] war.” ...

“I think they did a lousy job and we’re making for it now because the questions that should have been asked were not asked and because of 9/11 and the fear of being called unpatriotic, un-American and so forth. We let the country down,” Thomas added.

You know what bugs Helen Thomas about bloggers? We do it better. We do it faster. We fact-check our information in ways that the old media used to do, and they no longer do. They've become so entrenched in society that we should accept their word as if it came down from up on high. she accuses us of screwing up news on the Iraq war. That tells me she's never read any dispatches Michael Yon, Michael Totten, or Bill Roggio; all three of which have gone to great lengths to report the news from Iraq and Afghanistan as independent embeds. And when was the last time Helen was there? Oh, that's right. She's NEVER been to any of them because she likes her cushy job in the White House Press Corps. (For the record, if I were president, she wouldn't be there any longer. I'd order her credentials revoked and let her blather away at me at Hearst.) If anyone has read any of the work those three men have put together, you also know that they put their lives at risk when they report on things. Read Michael Yon's Gates of Fire on the exploits of Deuce Four and tell me he doesn't put his ass on the line.

Helen's jealous because our rise wasn't this little fad the media thought it was. We were serious, and we're hear to stay. How else can she explain why so many news outlets have started their own blogs, and even brought in prominent bloggers to run those operations? She can't. She's a bitter old woman that should have been retired years ago. And she can try to besmirch our efforts, but we have a track record of nailing big stories that the MSM refuses to touch. Dan Rather and the fauxny TANG memos, John Kerry's real record, Reuters doctoring of "fauxtos" during the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict last year, Eason Jordan's unsubstantiated lie about soldiers targeting journalists in Iraq; the MSM didn't want to touch those stories. They didn't think they were relevant.

Unlike Bill Kellers' assertion that the public has a "right to know what they're government is doing," the people really have a right to know how they're being lied to and manipulated by news organizations that are no longer unbiased observers of news and events. They actively thrust themselves into the news. We don't do that. We report the news. Some bloggers, like us, give commentary to the news, as well. But there is no mistake where our political beliefs lie. No one can come to our site and be confused as to whether we are conservative or liberal. The only way people can tell that about the MSM is to read between the lines, and question when certain assertions are made. Helen Thomas has made several assertions about the "criminality" of this administration, and it's always without merit.

She really is a loon, and should rightly be put out to pasture.

Publius II