Monday, January 16, 2006

Chris Matthews vs. the Rule of Law

Chris Matthews let us know that he really doesn't expect that the President of the United States will obey the law.

Witness this exchange between Matthews and Russell Tice, the whistleblower who was one of the sources for the Risen exposé of the President's illegal domestic spying scandal.
MATTHEWS: We're under attack on 9/11. A couple of days after that, if I were president ... and somebody said we had the ability to check on all the conversations going on between here and Hamburg, Germany, where all the al Qaeda people are or somewhere in Saudi ... and we could mine some of that information by just looking for some key words ... I'd do it.

TICE: Well, you'd be breaking the law.

MATTHEWS: Yes. Well, maybe that's part of the job.
All of which made me think back to last summer, when I wrote the following previously un-published post:

Chris Matthews, who recently announced that he voted for George W. Bush, allowed his partisanship to show again. He is now such a thoroughly dyed-in-the-wool Republican that he has become an apologist for Nixon’s most despicable traits.

On June 7th, in a segment about the revelation of Deep Throat’s identity, Andrea Mitchell read a transcribed snippet from an October 1972 conversation in the Oval Office. The subject is Woodward and Bernstein’s source, and the speculation is that Deep Throat is W. Mark Felt. Suddenly, apropos to nothing in particular, the President asks:
Nixon: Is he a Catholic?
Haldeman: Jewish.
Nixon: Christ! Put a Jew in there?
Haldeman: Well that could explain it, too.

Andrea Mitchell continues, “Does that give you a sense of how ugly things were in the Oval Office back then when they did not remember that they were being recorded, Chris?”

Okay, it’s not really news that Nixon was an anti-Semitic S.O.B. But here’s where it gets wacky.
MATTHEWS: Yes, I know. And by the way, if you really study the tapes --I‘ve spent a lot of time with them—the worst possible influence in Richard Nixon, when it came to that ethnic stuff, was Bob Halderman. He always seemed to lead him into the ugly stuff, all the time when you go into those transcripts.

I don’t know what prompted Matthews to say this, but in this particular case, “Nixon’s The One” who played the anti-Semitic card.

The extreme right is completely out of touch with reality, or, worse, it is intent on creating a new (dare I say) faith-based reality to replace the fact based historical record. In this new reality, Nixon is a hero to be revered, not a criminal who committed crimes in the Oval Office including waging a secret war in Cambodia. Governor Schwartzenegger, who rose to power by overturning a democratic election, gave us a first taste of this with his speech at the 2004 Republican national convention. Chris Matthews has closed ranks with these anti-democratic forces.

How could the former Peace Corps volunteer, and Tip O’Neill staffer have gone so far around the bend? Well, Deep Throat advised journalists to “follow the money.” Matthews must have thought that the advice was to change your views to grab the largest audience.

I would tell you what I think that makes Chris Matthews, but I might offend the street-walking sex workers of the world.

“… and tell ’em Big Mitch sent ya!”

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