I may be misreading them but Mediaite seems to think she’s asking this semi-earnestly. Er, not so. Thomas’s “questions” about the Middle East have always been her way of pushing an apologist agenda that Tony Snow once dubbed “the Hezbollah view” but which should more accurately be described as the Ron Paul view: Put simply, they’re terrorists because we’re occupiers. No enemy of the United States ever acts on his own initiative, for reasons ideological or otherwise; they merely react to the many wrongs we’ve supposedly done them. This is at least the third time she’s tried to bait the White House: Back in May, she challenged Gibbs on his nutty assertion that our nuke-building friends in Iran are a threat, and a few months before that she tried to get The One himself to condemn Israel for maintaining a nuclear deterrent in the teeth of 50 years of genocidal threats from its neighbors. Now it’s Brennan’s turn to explain why a totalitarian Islamic supremacist movement that wants to rule the Middle East might have issues with a country whose economic, cultural, and political influence poses a mortal threat to its chances of doing so. And darned if he doesn’t do a terrible job of it. Watch and gape at how lame he is. Next time she asks, John, just tell her Abdulmutallab was angry over our centuries-long occupation of Nigeria. That’ll make her happy, I promise.

Having said all that, I really hope she repeats this question the next time The One holds a presser. I’d love to hear his answer. Click the image to watch.