Thursday, March 3, 2011
Chris Matthews Blows it Blasting Huckabee
Now that I've chimed in bashing Mike Huckabee for his dopey comments regarding President Obama's "Kenyan Connection", I have to add that Chris Matthews looked like a befuddled buffoon on Hardball in adding his own criticism (see above).
In this story, Matthews, to use a sports metaphor, looked like Ben Roethlisberger with the Steelers first and goal on the opponants' 1 yard line going on a mad scramble that results in a 20 yard loss. All he had to do was play the tape and say that Huckabee comes across as a fool (which he does). Instead, Matthews goes off an an discombobulated rant that makes him look like just as much a fool as Huckabee.
I must admit, however. It is entertaining watching these mad-hatters at MSNBC self-destruct over and over. First was Keith Olbermann; now it looks like Matthews and (Butter and Egg Man) Ed Schultz are on a race for second.
It turns out that Huckabee was on O'Reilly afterwards and said flat out that it was a gaffe. He had been on 44 interviews that day and so on. He pointed out that in his book, he wrote that Obama was born in Hawaii. He immediately corrected on national TV. It is surprising that he went on about it in some detail which makes it more than a misstatement. I think it shows how much those guys play the same record over and over so many times and they are on automatic pilot.
ReplyDeleteIt started like Obama saying that he had been campaigning in 57 states. I don't think he went on with that statement. It was a mistake and nobody I know of went on rant about it or linked it to the 57 Muslim states or anything else you can wring out of it.
Every politician is caught making misstatements. We all make verbal mistakes. Chris Mathews expanded it all out of proportion... which supports his views about how absolutely evil the Republicans are.
There is something though to the point that Obama did not have an average American childhood, living in Indonesia for a time, attending a madrassa for a short time, raised by grandparents. Not that there is anything wrong with that but it is not a typical American childhood.
I agree that Mathews himself gets completely unhinged every time he thinks he caught the Republicans in something.
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I had to stop listening after the first few minutes, because it became so boring and trite. If Chris Matthews would hire Gary Fouse as script writer, and the DNC would hire me, politics in this country would instantly be elevated to a much higher level of discourse.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear Huckabee corrected the gaffe, but as Miggie says, he talked at too great a length for it to be merely a slip of the tongue. It may be a little short of a lie, but shows that Huckabee is terribly confused.
I think what we see here is common to all stripes of journalism: there are simply too many people with journalism degrees seeking work, and they have to crowd two or five people in on little windows to chatter, so everyone will have a piece of the news pie, which multiplies the verbiage to five times what it takes to report the news.
Fox does it, MSNBC does it, CBS does it, PBS does it, CNN does it, everybody does it. As to the "birth certificate" issue, the Hawaii department of public records, not the president, sought a court order relieving them of sending out any MORE copies of Barack Obama's birth certificate, because it was taking up too much of their time and they had other work piling up.