Darrell Hammond, Please Pick Up The White Courtesy Phone
It's been quite a week for my boy Chris Matthews over at MSNBC's Hardball. The guy who parodies him over at Saturday Night Live has to be kicking himself that they're off until next month.

First Chris essentially called the President a liar or at least one who sanctions liars and their associated lying in reference to a badly edited piece from his show taken out of context--of course, otherwise it wouldn't be a political ad--for an anti-Kerry TV spot.

You would think someone who covers this crap for a living would be a little more jaded about such things, but no, any excuse to shout, which is brilliant.

Then he got all stroppy to the point of apoplexy in a bizarre, loud, disjointed, beautiful interview with author Michelle Malkin. I love Chris. And Michelle Malkin I'd seen on Bill Maher's HBO show the week before hawking her book Concentration Camps and Summer Camp Are Practically the Same Thing and being very sorority-girl snotty when the left-leaning audience would laugh at not-at-all pro-fascist Eva Braun-isms.

To sum up: love Chris, not so much the Malkin lady. But I fear I must come to the lady's defense as Chris twisted himself into full self-caricature mode, his huge Irish head purpling nicely as he latched on to a misunderstanding like a Lewinsky with tetanus and tried to beat the diminutive Ms. Malkin into bloody verbal submission.

She was talking about something in Unfit for Command (I will pretend that's actually the title in lieu of checking), the anti-Kerry screed that is, apparently, the only thing worth talking about in the whole world. Chris has obviously not bothered to burden himself with intimate knowledge of the contents of said book, though he has been centering his show around said contents since the whole Boat Guys Who Hate John Kerry's Ass or whatever they're called came out.

The book says (apparently) that one of Kerry's Purple Hearts was "self-inflicted" meaning shrapnel from a friendly grenade got him. Malkin repeated this. Chris decided it meant she was saying on her own that John Kerry shot himself in order to get a Purple Heart as part of his larger plan to get out of Vietnam early and with medals so he could run for president in 2004, hopefully against a feckless pseudo-Texas Air National Guardsman.

I know. I know! It was awesome.

I would have bought the book myself and given you a better accounting of the points of contention, but it seems Barnes & Noble accidentally ran out.

O Chris Matthews, why do I love thee so? It's probably the genuinely probing questions asked of people who are unprepared for them. It's also the anything-at-any-time comic-tragedy of Chris' lyrical intelligence crammed into something too small for it, like silly American politics. It's like watching Mozart play "Lady of Spain" on an accordian sometimes. Other times, I would guess, it's like something else entirely.

Seriously though, who needs to watch other people eating pig rectums or standing on a tree stump over a pit of scorpions in exchange for something as paltry as a big fat pile of cash when you have Hardball for reality TV?

Sadly, it's only on one hour per day.

Hey does having this blog make me part of the Liberal Media? Sweet.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 3.7


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 11:46 AM