The Harder He Blows
From our April issue (full content): It may sound strange to ask what’s happened to Chris Matthews. But in recent months, he’s been even worse than usual. No. We’re serious.
By Todd Gitlin
Web Exclusive: 03.23.06
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.
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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.
more at:
http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=11345