The Harder He Blows (Chris "Tweety" Matthews)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11345

Chris Matthews blows hard. This may sound less like a news flash than a crashing redundancy. And it’s true that yelling is nothing new for the omnipresent MSNBC/CNBC barking head, for whom picking up the pace and pumping up the volume almost always substitute for picking apart the fairy tales that keep the Bush White House intact. But in recent months Matthews’ obsequiousness toward his favorites and nastiness toward his bêtes noires have ballooned to new proportions. He’s told Tom DeLay, for instance, “You are not in this business for the money,” and said about incoming House Majority Leader John Boehner, “You can see this man’s greatness,” while declaring that the country went Republican in the 1994 elections because it was “tired of Hillary Clinton’s, you know ‘I’m going to run the country’ mentality.” As the faith-based bubble of George W. Bush goes on veering away from reality -- even from reality as seen by many conservative politicians -- Matthews, weirdly, is having trouble disengaging, with the one (important) exception of Iraq.

If you think the problem with public-affairs television is that it never scrapes a surface it doesn’t like -- or that it worships at the altar of power; or that it tilts so far right as to send reason sliding overboard; or that it’s alternately boorish and stuffy, then pious and jeering -- a cheerily bombastic Chris Matthews would tell you that you’re wrong on every count: The problem is that it’s slow -- or used to be. Paying tribute to John McLaughlin, who gave him his start in motormouth television, Matthews once told The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, “To his credit, John knew that speed was the missing element in public-affairs television.” Speed -- that’s what we need more of in American life.

Matthews learned his prime televisual lesson from the bullying McLaughlin, who kept his show, The McLaughlin Group, moving with fatuous prophecies, bolting from subject to subject before anybody could go off-message and flattering listeners into thinking that they’d just garnered the skinny from insiders. With his piping tones and a half-cherubic, half-self-regarding smile, Matthews uses his frantic manner to signal that he’s above the gritty work of serious journalism -- or argument.

Matthews is always running aground as he zooms rightward. On the eve of the State of the Union address, he did call Bush “a president who, for four years, has said one thing and done another,” but few of his interviews push the point home. Personal admiration triumphs. September 11 was not proof of the president’s failure but “the moment of the president’s greatest heroism.” You’d never know that the charmer in chief had gone so wrong in Iraq or Louisiana, or on medical care for Americans. The only problem Matthews has recently hinted at is that Dick Cheney has somehow acquired too much power -- as if Bush were not colluding with the vice president. Poor, well-meaning czar, victim of nasty old Rasputin.

[Virginia Dare]

1. If people stopped paying attention to him..

he might go away...:shrug:

[Chiyo-chichi]

2. But I like my cartoon shows.