Jon Stewart wasn’t having any. So the satiric guardian of press integrity grumbled on “The Daily Show” about the likelihood of people giving 89- year-old journalistic legend Helen Thomas a free pass after being caught in a video telling the Israelis to “get out of Palestine” and go back to Poland and Germany, where they “came from.”

Stewart didn’t want to hear any indulgences that she was old and crazy. So OK, I say, I hope Stewart isn’t listening while I join all those who might be saying how terribly sad it is that Thomas was publicly caught in our “gotcha” era in the act of being a crazy old coot and that a truly distinguished journalistic career was extinguished in the process.

If I’m lucky enough to make it to 89, I can almost guarantee that someone will be able to catch me saying more than my rightful share of crazy old coot things.

Which makes the miracle of 88-year-old Betty White all the more, yes, awesome. There may be hope yet for the Internetmad, youth pandering America we live in if Web cults, young and otherwise, can be formed around an 88-year-old actress who is the only surviving member of the group that literally put TV on the air to still have a viable career into the second decade of the 21st century.

Let us remember that George Burns had a viable career almost up to his death in 1996 at 100 (and that Andy Rooney, at 91, is still seen regularly on “60 Minutes,” which still nominally employs Mike Wallace at 92, though it’s a long time since he’s been seen working).

The only reason Burns didn’t play a long-planned 100th birthday gig at the London Palladium is that he died four months later. (One of my favorite Burns lines explains his penchant for younger women. “I’d love to go out with women my age. The trouble is there ARE no women my age.”)

Facebook already acted as an agent getting White into the host role of “Saturday Night Live” (she was good, though a little overreliant on the lecherous old dowager of smut role they invented for her years ago on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”)

And now the last surviving “Golden Girl” gets a brand new camp sitcom where a very real woman competes for the hosannas that await those who act like drag queens on TV (a la “Sex and the City.”)

The show is called “Hot in Cleveland,” and I’ll grant you it’s on the TV Land network, which has, up to now, not exactly been a major player on the cable dial.

It takes White more than half the pilot episode (it may not be the episode that premieres at 10 p. m. Wednesday night) to appear. That’s because there was a premise to establish and characters to launch—Valerie Bertinelli as a writer (honest), Wendie Malick as an aging soap queen and Jane Leeves as the eyebrow empress of cosmetologists in Beverly Hills. They play three L. A. friends on their way to Paris who are waylaid in Cleveland due to a plane malfunction.

There, in Cleveland, they discover the name of a bar on the Internet and find, on entering, a whole different world—a room full of heterosexual men who check them out (“They’re looking at us; in L. A. they look past us”) and invite them to sit at their table while having all the cheese fries and beer they care to drink.

It’s a funny premise.

Sean Hayes, of “Will and Grace” fame (and the unintentional focus of a recent flap over a Newsweek article on the non-question of whether gays can play straight; Hayes hosts Sunday’s Tony Awards) is the producer. “Frasier” writer Suzanne Martin is in attendance.

After the Brass Girls all get their taglines and funny bits in the pilot (the best: Jane Leeves, the morning after, licking last night’s french fry grease out of the pores on her forearm), White comes on in a pink track suit as the “caretaker” of a rented house in Cleveland, where they all decide to “summer.”

White gets laugh-track giggles by calling them all prostitutes. Leeves makes nasty Oprah and Maya Angelou jokes until coming right out to ask White, “What’s the deal with old ladies and track suits?”

Replies White: “In your 20s, you dress for men. In your 40s, you dress for success. In your 80s, you dress for the bathroom.”

Dignity, thy name is not TV Land.

It would be nice if White had somehow landed a TV role that presented America with a character who is EXACTLY the distinguished marvel she is—a woman pushing 90 able to juggle all the work an increasingly avid and demanding world wants to hire her for (not to mention hold her own against scene-stealers as virtuosic as Malick and Leeves).

But even though White’s more than ready for it, America probably isn’t.

We prefer to think of women her age as crazy old coots to be chastised by Stewart and tacitly forgiven by the rest of us.

What, after all, could be scarier than the notion that the longer one lives, the more proficiency and wisdom you acquire?

If that were really an accepted notion, White would rule.

But then, wait. Betty White does rule.

Good for her. And, I think, good for us, too.