Reporter Helen Thomas, the queen bee of the White House press corps for decades, has retired effective immediately. This shouldn't be a major news story - an 89 year old woman retiring - but it is because retiring has become one of the most abused words in political discourse. Right up there with misspeaking, retiring has become a euphemism for something very ugly which some individual or group would prefer not to acknowledge.

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In the case of Ms. Thomas, retiring is a euphemism for being pushed out of the public arena in disgrace after even the liberal mainstream media could no longer make excuses for her anti-Israeli diatribes. While she has a long history of referring to Islamic terrorists as "freedom fighters" and phrasing her questions to administration officials to obviously favor Arab positions over those of Israel, Ms. Thomas' recent statements on video that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jewish people should go home to "Poland, Germany...and America and everywhere else" were over the top even for her. She tried apologizing on her website last Friday but that evidently was not enough to put the matter to rest and today came her sudden decision to "retire."

While the fact that Ms. Thomas will no longer take up space that a hopefully objective, professional and non-bigoted journalist can occupy is a very good thing; let's not lose sight of that euphemism.

Just as "I misspoke" has become the last desperate battle cry of liars, "I'm retiring" has become the last pathetic whimper of those who have performed so horribly that even they know the battle is lost. How many politicians have claimed they are "retiring" when, in fact, they are quitting in the face of inevitable defeat?

Now Ms. Thomas has officially become the same type of person she so often covered - a reptilian creature slithering away in disgrace while hoping that history will only record that she "retired."