My wife told me she saw a TV show about a fellow who had survived being trapped in his car during a snowstorm for 14 days. That, alone, seemed amazing, but the part I couldn’t believe was the survivor’s claim that he had forced himself to stay awake all that time, lest he fall asleep and never wake up.

The truth, of course, is that I have no idea how long a person can keep going without sleep. The longest I ever managed was three days when I crossed the country on a train years ago and discovered, to my considerable annoyance, that I was unable to sleep sitting up. But even I, I’m certain, would have managed to doze off long before two weeks had elapsed if I had been taking a choo-choo to, say, Tokyo.

Thinking about the guy in the snow got me to wondering how long a normal person could survive without food and water, and how long Obama could go without giving a speech.

But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that the world can’t go even three days without a scapegoat. It is therefore perfectly understandable that Obama can barely begin a sentence without blaming something or other on his predecessor.

For most of the people of the world, Israel serves the same function as George Bush. Unfortunately for the world, that requires them to align themselves with Arabs and Islamists who are not, under normal circumstances, the most endearing of people, given, as they are, to religious intolerance, brutality towards their own women, a general antipathy to education and free speech, and an affinity for blowing up anyone who takes exception to the Quran, draws a picture of Mohammad or questions the historical accuracy of the Protocols of Zion.

Recently, a half-dozen boats left Turkey bound for Gaza. Turkey, by the way, is an Islamic nation, which has over the past half dozen years reneged on its claim to being either secular or civilized. The lie about the flotilla, widely promulgated by a corrupt world-wide media, was that these boats were filled with humanitarians accompanying food and medicine to the suffering souls being oppressed by the Israelis. The fact of the matter was that Israel had long established a policy of trucking in such supplies once they had made certain that the Syrians, the Iranis and the Turks, weren’t smuggling in replacements for the thousands of missiles Hamas had showered upon them.

Well, for openers, the “humanitarians” were affiliated with Hamas and other terrorist groups, and they were armed with knives, chains and iron pipes. Anyone who insists these were the good guys is the sort of creep who would cheer for the lions against the Christians.

In the wake of all this, Helen Thomas, the grand old doyen of the Washington press corps, whose own parents were immigrants from Lebanon, suggested that all the Israelis should go back where they came from. When pressed as to where that would be, she laughingly replied, “Poland or Germany.”

It so happens that by now a very large percentage of Israelis were born in Israel. Most of their parents and grandparents didn’t migrate from Germany or Poland after World War II because the majority of those people had been murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Many others came to Israel from the Soviet Union, Hungary, Ethiopia and the United States. Even more came from the Middle East nations that had exiled them and confiscated their homes and businesses in the wake of Israel’s successfully defending itself in 1948 against the Arab legions representing Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Also, in case it escaped Ms. Thomas’s attention, after the end of World War II, a number of surviving Polish Jews tried returning to their homeland. Well over a thousand of them were killed by Poles, who were not only a notoriously anti-Semitic people, but many of them had taken advantage of the War to confiscate Jewish property and feared they might have to give it back.

As for post-war Germany, it was under the command of Gen. George Patton, who confided in his diary, as reported on by Allis and Ronald Radosh in their book, “A Safe Haven,” that Jews “are lower than animals.”

Frankly, considering what a left-wing propagandist Helen Thomas has been during her entire career, I am delighted to see her damn herself to the same sort of media purgatory reserved for people like Walter Duranty and Dan Rather, who confuse celebrity with omnipotence, and personal bias with objective reporting.

Normally, after witnessing Ms. Thomas’s spectacular fall from grace, I would say that Christmas came early this year, but I know that would be premature on my part. Oh, Christmas will definitely come earlier than usual in 2010, but it won’t arrive until November 2nd, otherwise known as Election Day.

(Don’t miss Burt’s book, “Liberals: America’s Termites” – signed copies are available at the Patriot Shop.)