Chris Matthews: “I Forgot [President Obama] Was Black Tonight”
Chris Matthews, for the politically uninitiated and those not among the 0.05 share of the television audience who actually watch MSNBC, is one of the biggest raging idiots among the chattering class. To watch him regularly going so spectacularly far off the rails of his trains of thought as to defy all logical coherence is like watching an old J.T. Smith wrestling match, with the exception being that Smith botched his performances on purpose.
Like the rest of the hosts no one watches on MSNBC, Matthews’ profile and resulting douchebaggery has risen since the 2008 Presidential primaries, when he and everyone else on the network decided to become complete sycophants for Barack Obama. By way of Matthews’ personality, though, he became like that sycophant that the target of the affection really doesn’t want around, the guy whose attentions create problems far more often than they stroke the ego. (Every female reader knows what I’m talking about.)
During the primaries, Matthews headed up election coverage for the first few contests with fellow asshat Keith Olbermann. The decision to put opinion pundits in charge of what was supposed to be hard, objective news coverage produced pretty much what you’d expect. After Obama’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, won a surprise victory in New Hampshire, Matthews said on-air: “I’ll be brutal, the reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.” Watching the Super Tuesday results come in, Matthews said of a speech by Obama, “I have to tell you, you know, it’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”
Last night’s commentary about Obama’s first State of the Union speech has to take the cake:
What…the…HECK?!?
As I said in my post about Avatar, liberals have a tendency to view almost everything they encounter through the lens of identity politics, whether it be race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, or the like. It’s a nasty double-edged sword for them, because they get to own a certain position on those issues and pigeonhole people of competing viewpoints into the opposite one, but talking about it as much as they do tends to produce unguarded moments like this, where they tell you a lot about who they really are. Chris Matthews is yet another white liberal who is so enthralled by acceptably mainstreamed minorities that he latches onto them to be able to point to his association with them as proof of enlightened thought and an absence of racism. Unfortunately for him, he’s a loudmouthed jackass with a tendency to speak before thinking, and as a result, episodes like this have a tendency to stick to him with the same lamprey-like nature that he sticks to the president.
