She was, for fifty years, the bluntest of White House correspondents, not interested at all in sucking up or throwing softballs or preening before the cameras. She was what reporters are supposed to be: fearless, independent, and skeptical.

She was tough on Nixon, tough on W., and tough on Obama, and now the Washington press corps will be even less responsive and more supplicant than ever.

In an interview in the August 2004 issue of The Progressive by Elizabeth DiNovella, she noted how crucial it is for our democracy that reporters ask tough questions at Presidential press conferences.

Thomas said: “If a leader is not questioned, he can rule by edict or executive order. He can be a king or a dictator. Who's to challenge him? We're there to pull his chain and to ask the questions that should be asked every day, for every move.”

Yes, her recent comments were grossly insensitive.

To tell Jews that they should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland was offensive in the extreme, after what Jews suffered there.

But did her recent comments require that she be tarred and feathered and run out on a rail?

She quickly and fulsomely apologized for her remarks, as she should have.

And other commentators, like Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh, have said much more outrageous things than she, and they got to keep their day jobs.

What’s more, she was trying, in her clumsy and intemperate and arguably bigoted way, to point out that Palestinians are still an occupied people, which they are. The occupiers are Jews. That's a fact. Some of those Jews came from the United States, as she also said. Is it right that those Jews should now live on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank? (Some of these American Jews, I might add, are among the most racist against Arabs.)

To me, that’s an open question, and no one should be fired for asking it in a country and a profession that is supposed to cherish free speech.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.