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• Monday, July 21, 2008 12:34 PM

  Lizza, you, sir, are no Helen Thomas.

  I love it when the overgrown junior high school cool kids masquerading as "journalists," who comprise the East Coast media "establishment," put down their fruity cocktails, wrap themselves in the Noble Robes of the Fourth Estate, and start screeching about freedom of the press and media manipulation and whatever.

  I'm guessing that if someone of the caliber of Helen Thomas gives Obama a hard time about FISA or campaign financing or revisions to his Iraq timetable or whatever, Obama's still going to take her seriously and give her pride of place in the Press Corps, even if she spends the whole press conference hectoring him with difficult questions.

  But the cliquish, elitist New York media for whom Obama is simply the amusing progressive flavor du jour are not Helen Thomas. The New Yorker is like Playboy, only all the masturbation is mental. I really only buy it (occasionally) for a Seymour Hersh article, and end up riffling through pages and pages of in-crowd gossip, neurotic, pseudointellectual personals for Ivy Leaguers seeking other Ivy Leaguers, and ads for a tract by some medieval Jewish rabbi purporting to claim that Jesus never existed. It's a pretentious literary tabloid, is what it is, and Obama has no responsibility to give a seat reserved for a real journalist to a parasitic, pseudointellectual gossip columnist who's probably never set foot in the same state as the people that cover was purportedly ridiculing and who will fawn all over him just before stabbing him in the back.

  —Marianna Trench Read Marianna Trench's other letters
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