Chris Matthews is having an episode!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2013

Terrorists, Dog Day Afternoon and the great way Hillary looks: Through the end of the Clinton-Gore years, Chris Matthews was one of the two or three most influential broadcasters in the country.

He was also barely sane, but all hands agreed not to notice. He savaged Candidate Gore for twenty months, helping script the rest of the children in the ways to defeat Clinton’s veep. For quite a few years, he was also the capital city’s most unhinged Hillary-hater.

At the time, he was being paid $5 million per year by his owner and CEO, the conservative Republican Ole Massa Welch. Faithfully, the store-bought shouter pursued the Jack Welch line.

Alleged “liberal journalists” said nothing. They still won’t discuss this today.

By now, Matthews has been completely repurposed, in line with the new corporate agenda at his ridiculous “news channel.” On Tuesday, he showcased his reinvented Big Love in the following way, fawning over the visual greatness of his new greatest love of all:
MATTHEWS (7/30/13): Yesterday, we saw a picture, a very flattering picture of her and the president sitting as equals, as a president sitting with another president, a very presidential picture over in the Rose Garden. Few get that treatment.

And today, in the morning, she had eggs and, scrambled eggs and toast, I’m told, with the vice president of the United States, perhaps to pass to him her thinking. I’m sure they talked about it.

There’s more. The former secretary of state has released a Web video announcing her support for gay marriage—a Web video. She stood side by side with President Obama and three former U.S. presidents down in Dallas at the Bush library dedication. She came as an equal to them.

[...]

These are what people in politics call optics, and the optics point to a much less coy Hillary Clinton profile, as of this week, I believe, laying the groundwork to become Barack Obama’s heir apparent and the next leader of the Democratic Party and then on to the presidency.

Joining me is an expert, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, and Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast.

Governor, I do think—and you are an expert and much closer to the Clintons than I am, both to Bill and to Hillary. I think that they’re no longer playing the cat-and-mouse game. They’re— She now is looking fabulous. I don’t know—I know I shouldn’t talk about looks with a woman, but I’ll say it. The way she’s presented herself—it always gets me in trouble, and I’ll say it again.

She looks presidential as hell. I’ll just put it that way. The dark suit, the haircut, everything says this person looks ready for primetime, ready to go to the game. She’s got game right now. I’m looking at her and I’m saying no more pretending, “I might or might not.” The coyness is gone.
That’s the way he used to talk about Gennifer Flowers, back when Flowers appeared on his show, for half an hour, to list all the Clintons’ murders, in August 1999.

(“You're a very beautiful woman,” Matthews said at one point in that program. “And I have to tell you—he knows that, you know that, and everybody watching knows that. Hillary Clinton knows that!” “Gosh, you’re making me blush here,” Flowers replied, briefly putting her murder charges on hold. Matthews came right back at her: “It's an objective statement, Gennifer. I'm not flirting. So let's go on.”)

To recall the way he used to talk about Hillary Clinton, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/27/08.

Sadly, we regular citizens are part of a very primitive people. (We're tied to a dying animal, to utilize what Yeats said.) It’s astounding that a man like Matthews is still on the air, behaving quite oddly, after so many years of behaving oddly in the other direction. But in the years when he was sliming both Clintons, then Candidate Gore, the career liberal world just sat there and took it—pretended they didn’t notice.

Everyone agreed not to notice—and to this day, that past behavior simply cannot be discussed. The Corns and the Walshes won’t tell you about it. The Finemans won’t ask him why he has flipped. The Drums and the Krugmans won’t discuss the craziness that exists all around them, rendering their intelligent analyses essentially moot.

In one large aspect, your society is run by a guild of media priests. This rather crazy person is part of that ruling priesthood.

Matthews has been quite crazy this week, a bit like a performer on Fox. On that same Tuesday program, his opening segment featured Anthony Weiner’s alleged resemblance to the crazy, bank-robbing Pacino character in the famous film, Dog Day Afternoon. He played a lengthy clip of Pacino’s crazy behavior in the film, comparing the psychotic bank-robber to Weiner.

Joan was there, helping enable the crazy:
MATTHEWS (7/30/13): I saw a movie years ago. We’ve none of us have forgotten it, Dog Day Afternoon, about a desperate guy, a desperate guy who’s robbed a bank, and he’s desperately trying to appeal to the crowds. And there’s some hopeless kind of a, “Root for me, I’m the underdog.” It’s a classic scene, Dog Day Afternoon, with the great Al Pacino.

WALSH: I remember.

MATTHEWS: I think this is what this guy Weiner is up to right now. Let's watch:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PACINO CHARACTER: What hope have you got? Huh? Come on, put them on your head! Tell them you’ve got an attempted robbery!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Armed robbery.

PACINO: All right, armed then! Nobody’s been hurt. Go back there, man! Get over there, will you? He wants to kill me so bad, he can taste it!

Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! Attica! You guys are Attica!
(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: This New York guy that doesn’t have a prayer in heaven of being elected mayor of New York is out there doing this. He’s stirring up crazy. He’s trying to make himself a victim of himself, but somehow a victim of the media, of us, of the Clintons, even as of today. He’s trying to blame them for feeling uncomfortable about the guy.

Is this going to work? You’re a political expert. Is it going to work?

WALSH: No, I don’t think it’s going to work. I think that’s compassion on your part to compare him to that amazing achievement—accomplishment by Al Pacino, who does make him a compassionate figure. I don’t think Anthony Weiner is succeeding at that.
In Joan’s eyes, her darling Chris was being too compassionate! To watch this nonsense, click here, move to 10:15.

Matthews calling Weiner crazy recalls the iconic peas in the pod. For the record, Walsh became a “political expert” by the time she had fawned to Matthews so much that he knew she could always be trusted.

Last night, Matthews returned to the “Attica! Attica! Attica” chant as he kept wasting everyone’s time rubbing his own most sensitive organ as he complained about Weiner’s. Soon, though, he dragged out a new rhetorical ploy—three Republican senators are “political terrorists,” he said:
MATTHEWS (7/31/13): But first, the GOP at war with itself! Ted Cruz is going after fellow Republicans for not supporting a government shutdown over Obamacare. Let’s just say he’s a political terrorist on this one.

And Weiner’s sexting scandal has been very good for the tabloid business and for late night comedians.

Finally, let me finish with the political terrorists of the right. I’m going to talk about them. Their names are Cruz, Paul and Lee.

And this is Hardball, the place for politics.
He was going to talk about them!

In his next segment, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt told Matthews that he shouldn’t be using that term when he talks about Cruz. Eventually, Chris offered a thoughtful reply. To watch this full segment, click this:
MATTHEWS: You know, I have compared him to [Joe] McCarthy. Maybe that’s just the look-alike. I shouldn’t get into what people look like. But he does remind me so much when I look at him interrogating a witness on the Hill, he looks like Joe McCarthy. He just acts that way with that somber, indictive aspect, like this guy is the evil one.

But I will say he’s a terrorist, because what the guy has done, basically, he says my goals are—is demolition. Blow up health care, blow up the continuing resolution. Bring the government to a standstill. And then make us forfeit on the national debt.

Your thoughts, Steve? I know you’re not that kind of Republican. I don’t know what you make of this guy.

SCHMIDT: No. Well, Chris, I disagree with your use of the word “terrorist” in its application to him. What he is, is a demagogue. He’s irresponsible.

MATTHEWS: Why? Why is not a terrorist?

SCHMIDT: Because I think, when we use the word “terrorist,” we apply that to the Boston bombers. We apply that to the September 11 hijackers.

MATTHEWS: A political terrorist. I have said political terrorist. That’s what he is.

SCHMIDT: I’m just—I’m not, I’m not comfortable with the word. But—

MATTHEWS: OK, don’t use it. Use your words. Use your words. I’m comfortable with it.
“Demagogue” wasn’t strong enough for Chris. Chris was insisting on “terrorist.”

If memory serves, we liberals get very, very upset when the loudmouths do this on Fox. Whatever! Chris went on and on with Schmidt about the reasons why “terrorist” was the precise right word. “Let me go to war with you,” he said to Schmidt as he did.

But wouldn’t you know it? Just like that, Democratic strategist David Axelrod told this big nut the same darn thing! Axelrod not being a nut, he thought that word was wrong too:
AXELROD: Just to support my friend Steve, because we share the same barber, I want to tell you that I also am uncomfortable with the word, only out of respect for the victims of violent terrorists.

MATTHEWS: OK. I have the same respect. I make the point political. I have used the term political terrorist. I will continue to use it. But, for shorthand, I will say terrorist. But go ahead.

AXELROD: But here’s another point, which is this notion. And this is the point that Coburn and so many conservatives have made. They’re not going to defund Obamacare. Obamacare has a self-perpetuating funding source. And its funding is largely accounted for, outside of what they can affect.

MATTHEWS: OK. Then why are they—why are they, why are they threatening to crash it, if not for terrorist reasons?
As we've told you many times, MSNBC is patterning itself on Fox.

On occasion, people have suggested that Matthews may truly be mentally ill. The summer months sometimes seem to provoke this kind of episode from him. Or he may just be trying to pump his rather low ratings.

Whatever! This man was a hired political assassin long ago. He went on and on and on and on, teaching the rest of the Washington “press corps” all the stupid things they should say to put George Bush in the White House.

Jonathan Alter wouldn’t tell you. Howard Fineman wouldn’t tell you. David and Joan have pandered and fawned and kissed his ass for years.

For all those years, we the liberals just sat there and took it. None of our leaders had voiced a concern, and until six of our leaders say X, Y or Z, we won’t say those things either.

We used to mock the ditto-heads. By now, we have proven that they are us. As he stages his episode, Chris is treating us like fools.

Let us guess that some of us liberals are very much going to like it.

32 comments:

  1. "Let us guess that some of us liberals are very much going to like it."

    Some?

    He's one of their most-visible leaders and is securely featured on race-hustling MSNBC!

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  2. I don't think Ted Cruz looks like Joe McCarthy at all. He looks more like Manny Acta with hair.

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  3. I'm a liberal that long ago stopped watching cable news, in part because I damned near wrecked my vocal cords screaming at Matthews, et al. But other than people who appear on his show, have you ever heard anyone praise Matthews as some kind of genius? If his name ever comes up in a political conversation (and that's rare), the consensus from anyone I've ever spoken to is that he is an unhinged lunatic. Maybe that's not a large enough sample size, I know. Not to overstate Saturday Night Live's importance, but that is the way he has always been portrayed there. And it's not like he has good ratings, even by cable news standards.

    Yes, he is a bad joke. But I don't see him having any serious influence either.

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    1. Not by way of objecting to your point, but Matthews has been a mentor-figure to a lot of media shavetails over the years. So, he may have some influence on those in the media and thus this influence may be more profound than one would suspect.

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    2. I agree with Anon@6:40. Much ado about nothing. Probably due to a slow news cycle, even for bloggers.

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    3. "Unhinged lunatic" think that says it pretty well.

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    4. "Much ado about nothing."

      Yes, oh just simply *everyone* says he's an unhinged lunatic, just NO ONE says it in public.

      That's why Somerby should just drop it.

      /moron

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  4. Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Piers Morgan, Rachel Maddow etc. etc. They all stink. How many times did Anderson Cooper interview Iman Obeidi, the woman who claimed to be gang raped by 15 of Qadaffi's soldiers. Anderson loved that story. Then Iman and her family were expelled to Kuwait or Qatar and a few weeks later Kuwait or Qatar threw them all out. Where are they now? How come Anderson hasn't followed up. He's dreadful, too.

    The Zimmerman case was a watershed moment. They reveled in the lying and race baiting. Showed how sick the whole mainstream media is and if you had any question in your mind about any of the "conspiracy theories," (JFK or RFK or MLK assassinations, moon landings, 9/11, Oklahoma City, underwear bomber, etc.etc.), well one thing you know for sure is that any of those theories might be true because for sure the mainstream media would lie about it. How do you know they are not lying to you about anything when they keep telling you Zimmerman was told not to leave the car and they keep showing you pictures of an 11 year old Martin? I don't have any personal ability to know whether the moon landings were faked or real. You don't know anything you think you know if you heard it from Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Anderson Cooper etc. - Karen

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    1. People who don't actually watch much television probably shouldn't pronounce on what television is covering or not covering.

      Case in point, CNN and Cooper did repeated follow-up stories and interviews with Iman, who has been in the U.S. for a year or so now and isn't adjusting very well.

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  5. How many Our Fathers and Hail Marys will Chris have to recite as penance for the damage he and that other Irish lout have caused?

    Same for the banshee.

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  6. Based on the size of this thread, it looks like when Bob turns his Tall Trayvon Tales into a retelling of the damnable things Chris Matthews & Co. did to Clinton/Gore, a lot of his new commenters will yawn. Probably because the players were packing pens and keyboards, not pistols and Kel-Tecs.

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    1. I wish this blog let us have avatars.

      http://olegvolk.net/gallery/d/36140-1/courtney_sub2000_5454.jpg

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    2. except that i think somerby himself makes a number of the comments.

      and if im right that hes hes being paid for some of his themes, he could have paid outside help making comments as well.

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    3. "except that i think somerby himself makes a number of the comments"

      That's wishful "thinking." Of course, you don't know WTF you're talking about. I've noticed you drop this idea before. "Oh the comment agrees with Bob. It must actually *be* Somerby." Pathetic.

      And it's nearly always (not this time though!) after I've posted, so I know damn well it's not Somerby.

      I've told you before and I'll tell you again, I'm not Bob, you lowercase nutcase -- and nobody is talking to you!

      Now "hes hes [sic] being paid" for some of his themes?? And he's paying people to comment? My god, you're more far gone than anyone could have suspected -- and already we thought you were rubber-room material!

      Let us guess, who's paying Somerby to paint Irish-Catholic Americans as deserving second-class status?

      And no, lowercase nut, I'm not asking you. Get back on your damn meds!

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    4. Maybe we unpaid commenters have a class action like the interns?

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    5. you know writes:

      >>>>>except that i think somerby himself makes a number of the comments.<<<<<

      Except that the spam issue got so out of hand in comments here for months and, as far as I know, Bob Somerby never picked up on a correction by several different commenters in each of the threads to several Howler posts about a misstatement he kept making in the Reinhart/Rogoff paper debunking matter that it's pretty clear Somerby only occasionally, if ever, reads the comment threads at this site, let alone posts in them anonymously or under an assumed name.

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  7. I'm currently reading a history book, called Citizens of London. On the back are blurbs from Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews, Publisher's Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor. Evidently the publishers believe that an endorsement from Chris Matthews carries some weight.

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    1. Evidently the publishers believe that an endorsement from Tom Brokow carries some weight.

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  8. "Through the end of the Clinton-Gore years, Chris Matthews was one of the two or three most influential broadcasters in the country. "

    Actually, that statement is so ridiculous on its face that I stopped reading, knowing full well what the rest of this oft-written screed was going to be about.

    Really? "One of the two or three most influential broadcasters in the country?" From his perch on CNBC? After only a few years?

    So who did he pass up? Brokaw, Rather or Jennings? Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters?

    Nice strawman, Bob. Well, actually, not. I'm not sure Matthews was even as influential as Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, or even Geraldo Rivera.

    But go ahead and build him up just to knock him down, Bob. It's what you seem to do these days.


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    1. exactly. somerby is deeply dishonest.

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    2. Exactly.

      But you see, Matthews is in the other tribe from Somerby, so his sins have to be amplified, as does his terrible influence.

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    3. The Daily Howler (Thursday, November 1, 2007):

      Several commenters said we’re dumb for tracking Chris Matthews so much, since Chris has a fairly small audience. But Chris’ audience isn’t the point; the point of Hardball (and of the Chris Matthews Show) is the access it gives us to the mind-set of a large chunk of the insider press corps. Chris may (or may not) affect many voters, but he does affect insider journalists; on his show, you get to see their various narratives as they take their shape. It’s the closest you’ll come to being invited to those fatuous cocktail parties—the parties where this cohort’s group dynamic produces the hopeless, gong-show narratives that drive our electoral process. Over the past dozen years, Chris has been exceptionally harmful to Big Major Dems, in large part because of the way he influences the younger journos who rank below him in the insider pecking order. In this journalistic cohort, narratives filter down from the top; people like Matthews and Russert assert them, and the lower orders agree to repeat them. Chris lies at the very heart of a large chunk of the insider press corps. If no voters ever watched his show, it would still be must-see bad TV.

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    4. @bob somerby 2007

      so the general public is more discerning than journalists and their employers? i dont think so. media people may come off as dim at times, but i think thats largely a function of them being glorified pr agents for the moneyed interests which forces them to defend weak positions, or at least to hedge and not give full throated arguments for what they may really think in order to to keep their jobs.

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    5. CMike, the notion that the "insider press corps" are taking their marching orders from Chris Matthews is ridiculous on its face.

      Also, another favored Somerby target during the late '90s was the aforementioned Russert. If Matthews was "one of the two or three most inluential broadcasters in the country" at that time, where was Russert on that pecking order?

      It would also have been helpful, back in 2007, to put some names to at least some of those "insider journalists" that Matthews seemed to have so much control over. But of course, Bob never got around to doing that -- then or now.

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    6. In the late nineties GE, on and off, was the biggest corporation in the world, the parent company of one of the hand full of major media conglomerates, and Jack Welch about the most prominent of all the era's highly celebrated CEOs.

      As for Russert v. Matthews, Russert's show aired once a week and his spent more of its time featuring news makers while Matthews was on five times a week giving more exposure to journalists, including print journalists trying to transition out of their downsizing corner of the infotainment biz and thereby save their careers.

      Personally, I tend to think that Somerby has always underestimated the role right wing media, itself, has played in shaping mainstream media conventional wisdom. However, it is Somerby, not me nor anyone else in this thread, who has an extensive archive of posts he's written backing up the various claims he sometimes tosses off in a post like the one he opened with here [my emphasis], "Through the end of the Clinton-Gore years, Chris Matthews was one of the two or three most influential broadcasters in the country."

      I won't go chase it down but I know he's posted arguing that Maureen Dowd was one of the two or three most influential print journalists during this same era, differentiating between the roles played back then by Dowd and Matthews specifically and broadcast and print media players generally.

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    7. "Over the past dozen years, Chris has been exceptionally harmful to Big Major Dems, in large part because of the way he influences the younger journos who rank below him in the insider pecking order."

      >>> somerbys intuits this and you buy it. that doesnt make it so. it seems to me that a man like mathews would be the last journalist the others would emulate. he has proven to change like the wind as internal and external pressures change. that wouldnt engender confidence in any logical person.
      ----------------

      "Jack Welch about the most prominent of all the era's highly celebrated CEOs."

      >>> he had a big mouth but that didnt give him more power than any of his rivals at the other tv networks and various media outlets who smartly kept a low profile, allowing welch to disproportionately take the heat for the medias malfeasance.

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    8. I would argue Matthews, while being less high profile, was indeed more influential than the names mentioned above. That had much to do with format. Matthews, a freshly minted Jack Welch millionaire, was cast nightly as the archetype "disgruntled Democrat". A blue collar kid from South Philly, always up for a game of stickball, possessing a former alterboy's sense of right and wrong. He was the ex-Democrat Congressional staffer who knew how "the game" was played, and quite frankly was disgusted by what had become of the Democratic Party and what was being done to the country by the Clinton/Gore crowd.

      It was a still popular Republican political theme dating back to Reagan- the "I didn't abandon the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party abandoned me" meme. Matthews played the principled "defector", a common guy with uncanny, even infallible political instinct, not at all unlike a certain rancher at the time humbly tending to the brush out in faraway Crawford Texas who was getting equally fed up over the goings on in Washington. Matthews was front man for a nightly Republican echo chamber that gave voice to virtually every right wing conspiracy theory they could come up with. I don't understand why liberals today are so quick to gloss all that over. They never seem to get tired playing the lapdog.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdFLPn30dvQ

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  9. Playing fast and loose with the facts is ALWAYS reprehensible. Well-financed editorial bias posing as objective reporting put George W. Bush in the White House.

    These two points are why I keep coming back to this page.

    Give 'em hell Bob!

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  10. "Joining me is an expert, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell"

    Ugh. Rendell is a lobbyist at this point. There should be a crawl under guests on tv, identifying their employer(s). It really would help the public.

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    1. right, or have them wear patches with their sponsers names on them like the race car drivers.

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  11. And as I have pointed out many times, this kind of programming tends to fail on the left, while it elects Presidents on the right. Obviously, we are better people then they are.

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