Chris Matthews

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Not only will David Shuster, the MSNBC talent who got into trouble over claiming the Clinton campaign had "pimped out" former first daughter Chelsea on the hustings, be returning to the network; his suspension will have lasted two weeks, and he'll be back in time for the NBC-sponsored debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama Feb. 26. Broadcasting & Cable reports:  read more »

 

Greg Sargent at TalkingPointsMemo has confirmed with sources of his that the prime beef Hillary Clinton's campaign has had with the MSNBC network is the pugilistic behavior of Hardball's Chris Matthews.  read more »

Chris Matthews woke up on Super Tuesday at the Ritz Carlton on Central Park South. For breakfast, he tore into a bowl of Raisin Bran with skim milk, slurped down a cup of coffee (no cream, no sugar) and attacked a stack of newspapers. Moving from story to story, he scribbled notes directly onto the newsprint, circling important facts and figures and jotting down the occasional exclamation points.  read more »

Chris Matthews addresses criticism of his recent statements about Hillary Clinton's career earlier today on his cable news show, Hardball.

And here is the comment that started it all:

On Thursday, Jan. 3, the night of the Iowa caucuses, Chris Matthews interviewed Rudy Giuliani live on MSNBC. “I noticed working with a lot of reporters, even mild-mannered reporters from New York,” observed Mr. Matthews, “they don’t like you much.”

That observation set up the question that Mr. Matthews wanted to explore: “Are you being screwed by the press?” he asked.

Was he? Mr. Giuliani demurred to his host, who proceeded to make the case.  read more »

During her visit to Nashua North High School here in New Hampshire earlier this afternoon, Hillary Clinton did her second presser in three days and got into a testy exchange with Chris Matthews.

He asked her to distinguish her platform on returning troops from Iraq versus Barack Obama. Mrs. Clinton said a few words, not particularly in season; she said she'd be very responsible about it. Matthews asked a follow-up and she said, "Well you guys can figure out the difference."

"No, you tell us the difference!" he barked.  read more »

Traditionally, the week after Christmas is Bowl Week, a bonanza of largely meaningless college football games, from the obscure PapaJohns.com Bowl to the august Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.

This year, the bowls will have competition for the nation’s attention from politics, with the day after Christmas marking the start of a frenzied week-long run-up to the January 3 Iowa caucuses (which will actually convene just as the Orange Bowl kicks off).

It’s quite fitting. Both clunky and dysfunctional relics of an outdated era, the college bowl system and the presidential primary process have more in common than you might think:

* College football has the Hawaii Warriors, a scrappy bunch who did everything they could to earn a crack the national title (winning every game they played), only to be locked out of the big game because pundits and media members were dazzled by teams with more star power. The Presidential race has Bill Richardson.

* College football has the greedy Presidents of the major conference schools, who bitterly and successfully resist the post-season tournament that the game so badly needs merely because they will lose their guaranteed paydays from the marquee bowl games. The presidential race has Iowa and New Hampshire.

* College football has Lou Holtz, sporting a 15-year-old wardrobe and railing at a camera. The presidential race has Chris Matthews.

And so on.

Yesterday, NBC executives named John Reiss, former executive producer of The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, as the EP of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews. His first day at the new job was Tuesday.

On Friday, the Media Mob caught up with Mr. Reiss via phone. Mr. Reiss said that working at Nightly News had been great because he got to do a little bit of everything, but that he was excited to start focusing more on politics. "It was like being in school where you take lots and lots of classes," said Mr. Reiss. "Now I'm concentrating on my major. Politics was always my favorite subject."

In recent years, while at Nightly News, Mr. Reiss had reportedly fallen out of favor with anchor Brian Williams. He seemed enthusiastic about the fresh start.  read more »

In preparation for Don Imus' impending return to radio, Fishbowl DC has made yet another journalistic attempt to figure out which of his high-profile guests will go back on the show if asked. Chris Matthews, Chris Wallace, and Craig Crawford all say yes. Others still seem to be waiting to see how things play out.  read more »

At least once a week, usually sometime in the early afternoon after a big, heavy lunch, when our mental activity is at its absolute nadir, The Media Mob likes to head out in search of the perfect low-energy media treat. Namely, power rankings. Who's up? Who's down? Who snuck into the top ten? Which stinkeroos are stuck at the bottom?
Depending on the time of year, our power ranking fix typically ranges from football to basketball. But now thanks to the thoughtful folks at MSNBC, our options for drowsy media consumption have expanded into heretofore unimaginable power ranking territory. To wit: Today, MSNBC announced that Hardball with Chris Matthews will be launching "Hardball Power Rankings."  read more »

Even as it disappointed on the field, the Super Bowl supplied racial drama. The historical celebration, that a black coach was finally coaching a Super Bowl team—and not just one, but both coaches, both teams—was all over the airwaves. Even ads brought it up. Hooray.

Time to get on my hobbyhorse. I gather that on the McLaughlin Group yesterday, they—warning, here comes Yiddish—kvelled about black advances, black power, and Pat Buchanan said, Talk about power, what about the Jews, 2 percent of the population, 13 members of the Senate. Etc. No big surprise, he didn't exactly start a conversation.

As a pluralist (I want all races and ethnicities to mingle and disappear in the great liberal bath of Humanity; alas, they haven't yet), it interests me that Buchanan broke a rule: some ethnicities and races can be openly described in our journalism, others spoken of only in coded ways. Chris Matthews, for instance, regularly welcomes guests named McCain, Kennedy, Murphy, McMillen with jokes about Irish night, or insights about Irish politics. He's a street smart guy, he loves ethnic politics. Matthews wants to talk about Jews as openly but he finds he can't go near it.

The other night, telling Ben Ginsberg that his scenarios about Iran "scare the bejesus out of me," Matthews said that Bush was still surrounded by "ideologues" who support attacking Iran, and that if Bush did attack Iran, Hillary would support him "for political reasons." All code for Jews. Now that Walt and Mearsheimer have broken the taboo, you'd think Matthews could say what he thinks: Jewish money is essential to Hillary Clinton's candidacy, Jews by and large support an aggressive response to Iran because of Ahmedinejad's anti-Israel rhetoric, the neoconservatives are rightwing Jews, many of whom have intimate connections to Israel's rightwing leaders.

Right now the Jewish press is the only press that will delve into this stuff. Presumably because while black-coaches-in-the-Super-Bowl confound stereotype, Jews-in-high-places confirms them. So the Times ignored Walt-Mearsheimer. I am of course for talking about Jewish power because I think it's politically significant, and the Mideast is a powder keg. Also, if we openly identify the simple fact that protecting Israel is part of our Middle Eastern policy, Americans will a, almost certainly support the policy, while b, they increase pressure on a centrist (Jimmy-Carter-James-Baker-John-Mearsheimer) agenda: Israel's hateful occupation of Arab lands is part of our problem.

Yesterday I got a fundraising letter from Bill Clinton, on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It's three pages long and begins, thumpingly, by saying "The next five weeks are critical for America and the world. We've got to stop projecting distrust and arrogance to the world..."

Couldn't agree more. But the entire document does not use the word Iraq. Not once. And according to polls, all but 124 people in America now think it was a mistake to invade Iraq. The letter demonstrates that Democrats still do not know how to capture the antiwar vote—i.e., they have no plan that is different from Bush's, really, as Chris Matthews points out so often—and also that Democrats are, from a financial standpoint, a war party. Most of the Dem Sen.s of course voted for the war, and they did so as a real reflection of their constituency. And many of the people who would be giving money to the Dems are for the war, or at least somewhat for it. I can imagine a few reasons that the Blue-State rich would feel this way; the identification of our interests with Israel's, at a time when many fear that Israel faces an existential threat from Iran, cannot be left out (underscoring the point that the domestic opposition to this war has to flow from a different source from the opposiition to Vietnam).

As a devotee of Chris Matthews, I'd point out a couple new trends on Hardball. A, he's been using profanity, saying "damn" a lot and "bastards," usually about our failed foreign policy; and B, he's trying to give the neocons their comeuppance, but isn't able to. The trends merged last week when he said to Frank Rich, "Dammit, that's what a leader's supposed to do, avoid the traps people are leading him into" (that's not verbatim, but its close) in faulting Bush for invading Iraq and dismissing the "bad intelligence" canard.

Matthews's great virtue, and limitation, is that he's so street-smart. He has political understanding and shrewdness in his fingertips. And so he recognizes the continued effectiveness, politically, of Bush's idea: the way we fight terrorism is over there, not here, and aggressively and unilaterally; that will make America safer. It still works on the street. But Matthews is enough of a thinker to recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of those ideas, and to wonder at why the neocons and their fellow travelers (who have never shouldered a weapon, as he points out) are not now smoldering on the ashheap of history. Last week he said, in so many words, Someone has to come up with a better idea to counter that Bush idea. This is a great political challenge. It's one thing for any thinking person to know that Bush and the neolibs and John Podhoretz and David Frum got it wrong in Iraq and the Middle East, it's another to come up with a positive vision of limited American power that can be stated in a slogan and that has traction on the street—that people think will make them safer in an unsafe world. Matthews himself joined the Peace Corps in the 60s because of such a vision, put forward by JFK. Myself, I think the neorealists are doing the best thinking here, from Robert Pape to Stephen Walt to Anatol Lieven—along with the understanding that we win hearts and minds by offering a helping hand, the idea of Navy Secretary Winter. But someone smart and political has to imbibe the ideas and then regurgitate them into the tiny beaks of the general populace. Any takers?

When is the last time the New York Times did major stories on Noam Chomsky two days in a row, one jumping off the front page, and excerpted his work? Like... never.

Let's understand what's going on. All the American politicians may be denouncing Hugo Chavez, but he's gotten into the water supply. His Diablo speech was a big moment, and actually successful, in a way that so many other gestures the right wants to dismiss as the U.N. Follies have not been. Because his ideas have resonance in the United States. A few leftwing friends have grinned, telling me how much they liked what Chavez said. The resonance springs from a problem only the left has grappled with so far: the U.S. is losing moral legitimacy, globally. And as Chris Matthews pointed out on Hardball, Chavez wasn't afraid of Bush. He made fun of him, in his house. Made him look weak. If Chavez was a monkey, then how come Chomsky's #1 on Amazon?

There's an old rule in journalism you're are supposed to have three examples when you posit a trend. I've just got two, Chavez and Chomsky. But the writing's on the wall: The left is back. The Iraq effect is finally happening; you can finally get something beside a lump of coal for the position: I was against this stupid war because I thought it would hurt America and the Middle East. The political establishment/ media has held out against the news for as long as they could, now Hugo Chavez is putting it on the front page.

(Is this analysis self-serving? Well, yeah. Is it correct? We shall see...)

I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It's the 1980s and the height of the violent "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American Catholic activists on air. Then he screws these guys to the wall. He asks them what being Irish-Catholic means to them, he grills them about whether they are sending money to the Sinn Fein or the Provisional IRA. He shows us from the inside out why an American interest group feels as passionately as it does, and how it is heating up a hot zone overseas.

But here's the rest of my fantasy: Matthews does the same thing now, for Jews and Israel. Only this time he isn't gathering Catholic corner boys like himself, he is gathering neocons at think tanks and publications and White House offices.

Chris Matthews should do this because as he now demonstrates nearly every night, he believes (as I do) that devotion to Israel on the part of socially- and politically-empowered hawkish Jews helped to distort our leaders' definitions of American interests. He should stop hinting, and put his money down on the counter. Matthews is probably the smartest guy about politics—if not ideas—on air, and if he is holding himself back, it just demonstrates the influence of the Israel lobby. People are afraid to take it on.

Matthews is losing his excuses on this. As it is, night after night, Matthews goes after the Iraq hawks for their deluded Middle East agenda. On Hardball on Friday night he kept shaking his head and saying WHY did they believe this line of nonsense? He seems to have just woken up to the tremendous imposture that Israel-centric right wingers represent  read more »

Chris Matthews is on fire these days. Joe Lieberman's loss has freed him to offer pitiless critiques of Democrats who voted for the war. Last night he said that they knew it was a bad decision in 2002 but went along with it out of political fears when they should have displayed "courage"—so let them twist in the wind now.

And Monday night (8/14) Matthews used an interview with Seymour Hersh to attack the administration for conflating Israel's interest with our own in the Middle East. Yep, he used the conflate word, even as he turned the voluble Hersh into a potted plant:

MATTHEWS: Let me cut you off here, because we always conflate these issues. Does [Bush] see Iran as a regional threat to countries who are on our side, like Israel and the other so many Arab countries, or does he see it as a strategic threat? Because this was the whole fight over Saddam Hussein. Of course he was a regional pain in the butt, of course he was a problem to some tactical extent to Israel—he wasn't a strategic threat to Israel. But is Iran a strategic threat to the United States? Does he believe that?

HERSH: I don't know what he believes.

MATTHEWS: How could it be a strategic threat to the United States?

HERSH: I don't know what he believes...

MATTHEWS: You know what it brings into question? Here's an administration that for political or other moral reasons or historic reasons—maybe because his father was pro-Arab—is the most openly pro-Israeli administration in history, in terms of the P.R. And you have to ask yourself, has the loss of our power brokering ability in that region been a bigger loss for Israel than anything we could have done for them?

If anyone can mainstream this issue, Matthews can. In foreign policy circles, what he's talking about is Realism—letting states figure out their relationships by themselves, not messing with their internal politics, doing a little off-shore balancing. As I've said before, and echoed now by the Nation, the left is turning more and more to realism.

Last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews gave LA congresswoman Jane Harman political cover by allowing her to sound off against the Bush Administration on Iraq. She blamed it for "enormous mistakes" in the conduct of the war and for taking its "eye off the ball."

That's shabby. Matthews, a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Swaziland who has attacked the Iraq war plans, sometimes with courage, knows that Harman was one of the leading "liberal hawks" in the House who supported this war, though lately she has been running away from her record. He shouldn't let her off the air without a good spanking: What mistakes of judgment did she make? What does she regret? How much did concern for Israel's security figure in the Dem-hawks' support for the war? Harman is in a Liebermanlike primary with an antiwar candidate in California: former teacher Marcy Winograd. Shouldn't Winograd get equal time?

P.S. The claim that the Bush Administration made huge mistakes in this war is the favored burrow of the liberal hawks. The mistake was the idea they bought with such enthusiasm of invading a country that did not attack us. 500,000 troops wouldn't have made a difference. Why don't they blame the military while they're at it?

Tom DeLay was on Chris Matthews' Hardball last night and boy is he weird looking. Too tan, too slick. I wonder if he's had work done. But he said of Valerie Plame: "She's not a CIA agent, she's not out in the field. She sits behind a desk in Langley." The purpose of the law was to shield people in the field who were in harm's way.

DeLay may be a 3-toed lizard, but he's right about this. There is something so empty about (my side) the left's piety on this issue, something so carney about Joe Wilson's tears, as I've said before. Leaking of secrets happens all the time in Washington, it should happen. I really could care less that Plame was outed. I wonder how much she cares about it, really.

If Bush's side had any intellectual integrity, they would have adopted the DeLay position from the start. But they didn't. Because here Joe Wilson is right: they are viciously sanctimonious. This case became politicized—because of the right, its need to protect its image in the big carnival, "the war on terror," and its willingness to do anything to protect the lies that led up to war. The crime was meaningless; it's the coverup.

Chris Matthews' line on Zarqawi's death yesterday—"he's dead as Julius Caesar"—was ten times as poetic as President Bush's: "Zarqawi has met his end." And Bush's writers had more advance warning than Matthews's.

I gather the line comes from Malone on The Untouchables. Or did they steal it from Joseph Conrad's Victory, in which two character argue over the coal mine one is holding on to:

"`But all this is as dead as Julius Caesar,' I cried. `In fact, you have nothing worth holding on to, Heyst.'

Uh-oh. Just did a Google book-search on it and found it in Hawthorne, H.G. Wells, Simeon Baldwin. Oh well—good line, no matter who said it first.

Let's face it: the Israel lobby may be looking at what the Cuba lobby faced six years ago: that moment when its interest ceases to be a special interest, when ordinary Americans see their own interest at stake in the policy, and take that policy away.

For the Cuba lobby, it was the Elian Gonzales case. You remember the six-year-old, or was he eight? It doesn't matter. The kid whose mother drowned and he ended up with anti-Castro fanatics in Miami, who didn't want to give him back to his father. Castro was filling the streets of Havana with demonstrators, but this was another opportunity to stick it to Fidel. Then two great things happened. Steve Largent, a conservative Republican congressman (and former NFL star receiver, I think he set a receptions record) from Oklahoma came out strongly and plainly for returning Gonzales to his dad. And Bill Clinton did one of his few heroic turns as President, and said the same thing, and stuck to it. The return of Elian Gonzales was a great moment in American moral history. I imagine the Cuba lobby is still suffering from its political misstep.

The Israel lobby has asserted again and again that hewing to Israel's policies thru thick and thin is in our best interest. But it's not, and there are any number of signs that Americans are now turning on that policy. The moment that changed everything was surely 9/11, but the penny is dropping now. I'd cite the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, Tony Judt's warning to Israelis yesterday in Ha'aretz (cited in yesterday's post) that the climate was changing, and this bit from Chris Matthews of a few weeks back—

MATTHEWS: What had [Saddam] done against us?

VIN WEBER: He invaded Kuwait. He attacked Israel. They're our friends, our allies.

MATTHEWS: So we go to war with countries in the Middle East because they fight with each other. We'll have war forever. We will never be out of fighting wars.

Notice how Matthews severs American interests from Israel's interests. Or distinguishes them, anyway. This is an important, symbolic exchange. And, by the way, it doesn't mean that America will abandon Israel. But force it into line? That would be a good thing.

Last night, Chris Matthews greeted the new White House spokesman, Dan Bartlett, with a barrage of angry questions. Why did the Administration say that oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq? Why did the Administration say that the war would bring oil prices down? Bartlett tried to smile when he wasn't spluttering.

This is now the Matthews' treatment: angry questions about the lies told to take the United States to war.

He did it with Torie Clark: a couple months back:

All the arguments about W.M.D. have been shot down. No evidence of an African deal, no evidence involving aluminum tubes. All the arguments that your side put up to get us into this war have been shot down, especially the argument that we were going to be received by people who are going to be happy to see us. They are fighting us. They are not happy to see us. That the oil in America was going to be cheaper. That the oil was going to pay for the war itself.

Your crowd made every argument in the world to get us in that war, and then they all quit. What I can't understand is how an administration packed with hawks, they are all gone. Scooter is facing jail. Wolfowitz is gone. I don't know what else is gone, but all the hawks seem to be gone now.

And here he is, incisively cutting a new one for Vin Weber ten days ago:

MATTHEWS: What was the reason we went to war. I've never gotten that straight from anybody, why did we go to war with Iraq?

WEBER: Because we had a dangerous dictator who'd made war on three of his neighbors and who hated the United States of America and had used weapons of mass destruction in the past.

MATTHEWS: What had he done against us?

WEBER: He invaded Kuwait. He attack Israel. They're our friends, our allies.

MATTHEWS: So we go with countries in the Middle East because they fight with each other. We'll have war forever. We will never be out of fighting wars.

Something important is happening here. Matthews is plainly frightened by the deepening crisis of leadership. He believes that Bush hasn't got a clue and is stubbornly, stupidly holding on, putting the whole republic at risk. And he's hardly alone. Others are also afraid. Like Col. Larry Wilkerson, in a dramatic appearance at the Middle East Institute last week where he predicted all the generals coming out to sandbag Rumsfeld. "You haven't seen anything yet," he said.

No, we haven't seen anything like this before, a revolution by insiders afraid for the Republic. Throwing their bodies down out of a sense of service, as Matthews, a former Peace Corps volunteer, is doing. It's heroic. But when are the people and politicians going to catch up? Hurry—please.

In this very strange Hardball clip, Chris Matthews claims direct sight into Hillary aide Howard Wolfson's soul.

(via Wonkette)

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