They say the older you get, the less you care about what people think. The physical reason for elderly insouciance may be frontal lobe degeneration resulting in a loss of inhibition and social judgment.

But that's no excuse for the vile anti-Semitic outburst by Helen Thomas, America's "dean" of the White House press corps, who said Jews should "get the hell out" of Israel and "go home" to Poland or Germany.

Facing a barrage of well-deserved criticism, Thomas resigned on Monday from her job as a columnist with the Hearst News Service, just a couple of months before her 90th birthday. The doyenne of presidential press conferences going back to John F. Kennedy's days thus ended her 70-year career in disgrace.

But her outburst was no aberration. She held her honoured status in the front row of the briefing room with the blessing of colleagues whose benign tolerance of her extreme utterings is a testament either to their belief in free speech or their relief at having her say the things they were too polite to ask.

In one press conference she prefaced a typical tirade by calling then president George Bush "the worst president in all of American history". However debatable that statement was, such ideological sloganeering didn't belong in a White House press conference and reflected poorly on the press corps as a whole.