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.
*snip*
Matthews always knows who the good guys are. They’re mainly Republican. To Chertoff on January 5, four months after Hurricane Katrina, he oozed, “You’re doing a great job.” To former Bush oil crony, campaign manager, and Commerce Secretary Don Evans, who had just admired the president’s “really straight talk” in the State of the Union address, Matthews cooed: “You’re one of the good guys. We all like you here. You’re great. We wish you were back in Washington because you’re a very civil kind of guy, and you’re bipartisan, and everybody likes you, and we could use you here in Washington again.” “Who knows, who knows?” said Evans. “Be sure to say hello to Kathleen for us.” Matthews: “I will. And maybe you’ll be chief of staff one of these days.” When Democrats are civil, he baits them for mushiness.
*snip*
Matthews is most interesting, though, when his heroes collide. Whenever he finds a rugged vet at odds with Republican policy, his circuits jam. So he bent over backward to encourage crusty old Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha to thump Bush the day after the State of the Union address. “Mr. Murtha,” he said, “do you think the president’s consciously trying to confuse the American people as to who attacked us on 9-11?” The two Purple Hearts Murtha earned in Vietnam made Matthews wonder aloud more than once just whom Bush meant by his reference to “defeatists.” But he was ambivalent about John Kerry. One moment he likened a Kerry ad to the work of a Nazi propagandist: “Who made that ad -- Leni Riefenstahl? You know what I’m talking about: a lot of flags.” He declared that Kerry “seemed to be saying” in his 1971 war-crimes testimony that “we are all Lieutenant Calleys,” a reference to the soldier who was convicted of murder for his role in the My Lai massacre. But he did press hard the Kerry-baiter John O’Neill, and asked the fire-eating Zell Miller, “Do you believe that John Kerry and Ted Kennedy really only believe in defending America with spitballs?” -- leading Miller to famously “wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.”
*snip*
Matthews sometimes gets fairness points for having once been a Democrat. An expired party card is a useful deflector when critics observe that his guests, his animus, and his vulgarity generally tilt right. As Ronald Reagan discovered long ago, when General Electric’s money was being passed around, a Democrat is something to have been way back when, and to have been born again from. It helps a hardball player get away with throwing beanballs.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11345
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