All right, Hot Air denizens. If this thread doesn’t have 500 comments by midnight, I’m going to post another Good at Cooking with Andy segment this weekend. My friend from the Left, Tommy Christopher, got a chance to talk with Helen Thomas at the White House today after she referred to our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan as “so-called terrorists”. Helen likes Tommy, so she had no reservations about going with the Full Moral Equivalence argument:

TOMMY: All right Helen, when you asked the President about Afghanistan and Pakistan during the press conference, you said, “so-called terrorists”. You want to explain why you say “so-called terrorists”?

THOMAS: Because some people think they’re freedom fighters. They are in their own country, and we could dub them as terrorists, but … and their tactics are terrible, but so are ours. We dropped bombs on people in Iraq, people who did nothing to us.

TOMMY: So would you say that it’s for the sake of intellectual honesty?

THOMAS: [NODDING] I say we need it.

Caleb Howe, a conservative at Red State who partners with Tommy on projects and events, chalks this up to Thomas’ liberalism, but I think that lets her off the hook. Plenty of liberals don’t buy into the nutty moral equivalency of terrorists who target civilians for political purposes and the people who fight the terrorists hiding among the civilians. Mostly that comes from the lunatic Left, the International ANSWER and World Can’t Wait quasi-Stalinists and terrorist apologists.  I’d include Michael Moore, who argued that al-Qaeda in Iraq were the modern-day equivalents to the Minutemen of the American Revolution, who also made their argument by blowing up carriages with huge bombs buried in the streets and beheaded civilian engineers that they kidnapped from the British … at least according to Moore.

Beyond that, Thomas doesn’t even pay attention to the issues.  The Taliban in Pakistan cross the border into Afghanistan to fight the government and NATO; they are primarily Pakistanis, not Afghans.  Osama bin Laden is neither — he’s a Saudi of Yemeni descent who runs a network of mostly foreign fighters comprising Uighers, Uzbeks, Chechens, and Arabs out of the FATA, and who by the way attacked the US on 9/11 and not any of the aforementioned countries.  “Their own country” is as ignorant as it gets.

So what do Hot Air readers find more objectionable — the actual statement from Thomas, or the condescending manner in which she explained it to Tommy?  I’d say six of one, half-dozen of the other.

Update: Look, I know you are all having a lot of fun picking on Thomas’ looks, but believe me, if someone told me I’d be doing this at 88 with my own seat at the White House briefing room, I wouldn’t really care what I looked like as long as I was still breathing.

Update II, 12:11 am: Mission accomplished — no Good at Cooking with Andy this weekend.