Remember when you thought Helen Thomas was just a spunky, tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners White House correspondent in bad shoes? Well, those days are well nigh over. Today, ‘tseems, she’s just another partisan grump, hectoring Ari Fleischer and Dubya with her insistently vapid questions and (more frequently) her inane columns. Here, Helen pulls a Rall out of her ass (or is it a “Moore”), suggesting that President Bush, by dint of his being a self-styled “compassionate conservative,” must go easy on al-Qaeda gunman Johnny Bin Walker. Why? Well, because Dubya was once young, too:

Perhaps in mulling over Walker’s life, he will try to remember when he was a 20-year-old. True, he did not defiantly challenge the system as so many young protesters did in the Vietnam War era. Politics was not his bag at Yale when others were marching in support of civil rights and against the war.

Nor had he yet found religion as the guiding light of his life. He surely knows he was a different person back then. The president has often sought to dismiss his youthful escapades with the cute tautology: ‘When I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.’ [emphasis mine]

That’s right. Helen’s reminding us that When Georgie was a young’n’, he snorted a li’l Coke in his frat house and was hit with a DUI. Naturally, then, he shouldn’t be so quick to judge Tali-Boy — who Thomas manages to equate with sandaled hippies gathering in a Berkeley field! Earth to Planet Helen: when you “protest” modernity by firing automatic weapons at your countrymen — and when you do so while fighting for a foreign army — you’re a treasonous scab-leak, not a mixed up kid!

String ’em up.

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