Jake, Jake, Jake...

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As Don Surber observed last week, Jake Tapper, via Twitter, is trying to get Sarah Palin to appear on 'This Week," ABC's Sunday TV talk show which Tapper, for the time being at least, is hosting.

Meanwhile, streiff at RedState.com noted Saturday, the press corpse (pun intentional) is circling the wagons around Helen Thomas. Sarah Palin also picked up on this, and she sent this Twitter message:

SarahPalinUSA Helen Thomas press pals condone racist rant?Heaven forbid”esteemed”press corps represent society’s enlightened elite;Rest of us choose truth

To which Tapper replied

jaketapper @SarahPalinUSA Who condoned it?

Tapper's point -- that silence is not tantamount to condoning -- is, as streiff points out, "simple obtuseness." One is reminded of all the good people -- not only Germans, but the world over -- who sat in silence as Europe's Jews were rounded up and herded into cattle cars as the long black trains made their way to the death camps. Not to try to equate the two situations, but just to point out that silence is in many cases not golden. If Helen Thomas' colleagues can't see the dark irony in her remark that Israel's Jews should be sent back to the very same places where they were so efficiently slaughtered, then the press community suffers from a disease much more debilitating than a lack of sensitivity.

One wonders if Tapper's tweet is just part of his Twitter campaign to try to lure Gov. Palin onto his show. If so, we're not sure this is quote the way to go about it. If she can argue with Tapper on Twitter, why bother to appear on "This Week" at all? We believe it's more than that. The media protects its own, and Tapper, as part of the media, is part of the problem. If there ever was a time for the members of the press corps to condemn the actions of one of its own, this was it, and Tapper missed the boat. Thomas' own speaker's agent saw fit to terminate her as a client, but her press buddies, by and large, couldn't even bring themselves to criticize her. To his credit, Craig Crawford was one notable exception.

Even more troubling, the silence of Jake Tapper and his media colleagues is just another sign of the hostility of the "progressive" American press toward the state of Israel. Sarah Palin is right to call them out.

- JP