Last week, Lindsey Stone, a 30-year-old Massachusetts woman, came under fire after a photograph surfaced on Facebook showing her flipping the bird next to a sign at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery that says “silence and respect.”

Stone ultimately lost her job because of the picture and the firestorm it caused. But on his podcast earlier this week, Adam Carolla and guest Greg Gutfeld took the media to task for ginning up the “phony outrage.”

“The whole thing is — this chick, you know, she is not part of an al-Qaida sleeper cell,” Carolla said. “She’s like some sort of 30-year-old chick who is like goofing around. It’s like you see a sign that says ‘do not touch,’ and you touch and take a goofy picture of you touching it … again, the phony outrage.”

Carolla pointed to a clip from NBC’s “Today” last week, in which Matt Lauer, Natalie Morales, Savannah Guthrie and Al Roker all took turns condemning the photo.

“First of all, Lauer is like, ‘Of all places, Arlington, of all places,’” Carolla said. “If you did this at Burning Man, Matt, first off — we wouldn’t be talking about it. Secondly, it wouldn’t be an issue. The sign says ‘silence and respect,’ and she took a picture. Now here’s what I’m saying — this young lady, nobody thinks she hates this country. Nobody truly thinks that she hates veterans or the military. Nobody thinks she is the new face of al-Qaida. Nobody thinks any of that. And everyone knows she poses zero threat this country’s national security, veterans — all of it. Everyone knows she was fucking around and doing something stupid. But it’s an opportunity for us to roast somebody, and we get to stand around and just get up on our fucking high horse up on Mount Pius.”

Gutfeld, the author of “The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage,” pointed out that the woman would be jobless long after her critics tired of being offended by the photograph.

“There are two things that bug me about it,” Gutfeld said. “The talk show people will not remember this two weeks from now. She’ll be unemployed. The other thing is she works with assisted-living people, as the talk show hosts claimed, [and] some of them might be veterans. So she actually does good work. These folks that are condemning her probably do less good work than she does. I agree, what she did was stupid and disrespectful, but she was doing it to the sign. And it was stupid, and she apologizes. Why did she lose her job?”

Carolla added Stone could sue her former employer for wrongful termination. But he seemed to be more irritated by the manner in which the “Today” show hosts covered the story.

“There’s four fucking adults there,” Carolla said. “No one gives a shit. Everyone is actually educated. The show, just from a programming standpoint — four people sitting around and agreeing with each other is not very compelling watching or viewing. Somebody should have said, ‘Look, what’s the big deal? I’m not defending her, but she was goofing off, in poor taste.’”

Follow Jeff on Twitter