Chris Matthews

Characteristic of our decadent, standardless, self-esteeming liberal “culture” is the presence of utterly appalling individuals in prominent and influential positions in politics, media, and the academy, and the fact that they are never called out on how bad they are. Here, in a rare event, one of these unworthies is called out on it. Chris Matthews of MSNBC is anatomized by Jack Shafer at Slate, with lots of direct quotes of Matthews’s on-air inanities during his coverage of the inauguration.

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Tim W. writes:

What a news crew they have on MSNBC! There’s Matthews spouting inanities and telling us Obama sends a tingle down his leg. Then we have Keith Olbermann, who is admittedly a bit more professional than Matthews. But in his case it means he’s calmly Orwellian as he stares Big Brother-like into the camera and recites Daily Kos or MoveOn propaganda as if it’s legitimate news. Finally, there’s the newcomer, perky lesbian Rachel Maddow. Her job is smilingly to remind us that anyone objecting to the homosexual agenda, to open borders, to race preferences, to (fill in the blank with any leftist cause) is a hate-monger

Spencer Warren writes:

The spot-on Slate critique of the egregious Chris Matthews links to a 2007 Slate article about Matthews receiving a 2007 award from the Churchill Centre. According to the fund-raising invitation, this annual award is given “for excellence in writing or speaking about Churchill’s life and times, or for applying his precepts and values to contemporary issues among the English-Speaking Peoples.”

The leaders of the Churchill Centre picked up Matthews as a trustee with a “name” for their masthead after he scribbled a typically shallow, useless article a number of years ago in The Weekly Standard about the Battle of Britain.

As if this award was not enough of an embarrassment to Churchill’s memory, at the same dinner the Centre gave its first Winston Churchill Award for Statesmanship to James Baker and Lee Hamilton, “for bringing people of diverse political beliefs together in the Iraq Study Group, which resulted in critical policy recommendations, many of which are already being implemented.” In reality, the Iraq Study Group was overtaken by a report issued by the American Enterprise Institute, whose principal recommendation—the surge—was adopted by President Bush. The compromise recommendations of the bipartisan study group did not exactly represent Churchill’s robust approach to security and war. (This is a separate issue from the broader question of our intervention in Iraq.)

The leaders of the Churchill Centre—many of whom are more idolaters than serious students of Churchill—seem to be so unembarrassed in their pursuit of big names to add to their masthead that they have even included Senator Richard Durbin, the man who several years ago on the Senate floor compared our troops in Iraq to Nazis and drew parallels between the Soviet Gulag and our imprisonment of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Needless to say, his remarks were re-broadcast throughout the Muslim world. Durbin was one of the leading Democrats, with Harry Reid, who after voting for the Iraq War treasonously turned against it for reasons of sheer political opportunism (as distinguished from legitimate, strategic reasons offered by patriotic critics).

It seems to be fair to say that any group or person that takes Matthews seriously itself serves as an example of what you accurately describe as our “decadent, standardless, liberal,” and, if I may add, meretricious, culture.

LA replies:

The basic idea of the ISG report was, “First we must reach a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians (as though that were doable), and that settlement will get Iran and other Muslim countries to agree to negotiate with us about a settlement in Iraq.” The report, which represented a bizarre merger of the “Realist” school with the Liberal Internationalist surrender school, made one utopian surrender (of Israel to the Palestinians) the condition for a second utopian surrender (of the U.S. to Iran). As soon as the report came out, it was met with widespread astonishment and ridicule. One of my articles about it was entitled, “Beyond laughter, beyond disgust.” And the Churchill Centre gave a Churchill Award to this pathetic group?

Indeed, in today’s culture, once you get in the establishment, then, no matter how appalling and worthless you are, you are set for life, receiving awards, honors, sinecures, board memberships, syndicated columns, your own TV show.

Here is Google listing of my entries on the ISG report.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2009 09:30 AM | Send