The one good thing about battling the flu at home is that it opens up huge swaths of time for reading. When you can do next to nothing, when you feel like the outside world is distant and it’s just you and your germs, that’s the perfect time to tackle a book.

I’d started reading Helen Thomas’ book, Watchdogs of Democracy?, a few weeks ago. Thomas, “the dean of the White House press corps,” as her author blurb says on the back of the book, has been covering presidents since JFK. And the book bears witness to this fact with the endless succession of presidents and staffs and press secretaries that she’s known and asked tough, direct questions of for more than 40 years.

But as interesting as her life experience has been and as insightful as her remarks are, the book needed the strong hand of an editor to clean up choppy sentences and cliche-ridden half thoughts that lead nowhere. About three-quarters of the way through, I was really looking forward to it being over and was still awaiting the knock-out insight, the payoff pitch. And then, there it was. An exchange with former White House press secretary Scott McClellan on May 25th, 2005:

Helen: The other day… you said that we, the United States, [are] in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you like to correct that incredible distortion of American history-

Scott: No. We are- that’s where we are currently-

Helen: In view of your credibility [which] is already mired? How can you say that?

Scott: Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you’re taking that comment out of context. There are two democratically elected governments in Iraq and -

Helen: Were we invited into Iraq?

Scott: There are democratically elected governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments, and we are there today –

Helen: You mean, if they asked us out, that we would have left?

Scott: No, Helen, I’m talking about today. We are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments –

Helen: I’m taking about today, too.

Scott: -and we are doing all we can to train and equip their security forces so that they can provide for their own security as they move forward on a free and democratic future.

Helen: Did we invade those countries?

Scott: Go ahead, Steve [with your question, referring to Steve Holland, Reuters White House correspondent].

Orwell would have loved this.