The Double Evening Standard

So I'm following this tempestuous teapot of a controversy over Helen Thomas and her intemperate remarks of late regarding Israel and Palestine, and I'm struck by a rather stark contrast.

Within days of her widely broadcast comments, she's lost her agent and other representation, resigned from her job, and it appears that the vast majority of her credibility and goodwill among the ever-forgetful news consuming public has gone up in smoke - a sad coda to an otherwise exemplary journalistic career. Such is the price of thoughtless candor, or so it would seem.

Whether all those who are determinedly up in arms on this topic wish to acknowledge some salient facts or not, the issue that I hold with this event is the unequal expectations given to the self-identified conservative commentators over the last decade or more of American politics who have made equal or greater 'gaffes', deliberate or otherwise, yet continue to hold their plush sinecures within the various media empires from where they continue their cultural assaults.

Ann Coulter...Glenn Beck...Pat Buchanan...Sean Hannity...Mike Huckabee...Laura Ingraham...Newt Gingrich...The list goes on a while, doesn't it?

Ms. Thomas has paid a rather massive price for her carelessly subjective honesty, where others have apparently received the dispensation to promote their studiedly sensationalist viewpoints without curtailment.
Whatever one's personal feelings on the topic, the lack of balance in response is quite obvious.

Those who point their timorous fingers in an accusatory fashion crying "It's not enough" that an apology is offered and a voice silenced would do well to remember who was one of the few - in fact, at times the only - to ask so many unanswered questions of the Bush administration from the front row of the White House press gallery, and just who the beneficiaries of those unanswered questions were and are.

;>)