Why Tweety is so infuriating -- in a nutshell

Yesterday Chris Matthews pointed out to Ron Christie [insert your own sound clip of closet door closing here], the toadying former aide to Dick Cheney the FACT, the double standard that Cheney and the entire Republican Party REALITY of the Bush Administration's lack of response to both the threats before the 9/11 attacks and to Richard Reid, the December 2001 shoe bomber. Of course he had to, given Joan Walsh's ferocious presentation of facts. But Tweety didn't stop there; he went on to point out that everyone on the right (and that includes Joe Lieberman) is using the attempted bombing on Christmas Day as an excuse to beat the drums for an expanded war in the Middle East.

Watch:

What's hilarious about this exchange is the Republicans regard the Democrats as the "Pussy Party", a bunch of overwrought, overly-emotional girly-men, not the real manly-man chest-beaters like Dick Cheney. Except who is it that's running around like a chicken without a head because a depressed, angry, alienated 23-year-old decided to get laid by 72 virgins in heaven? And yet here is Cheney's ventriloquist's dummy, complaining that Barack Obama isn't emotional enough.

So why is this an example of Why I Hate Chris Matthews? Because it shows that TWEETY KNOWS BETTER, even more often than what we saw last night, he does crap like this:

The press loves the boogeyman story because it makes them feel like crusaders for freedom and allows them to make common cause with macho right wingers. It's far more exciting than dull stories about losers who don't have jobs --- you can see the exhilaration coming off of them in waves. They love it.

Case in point, Chris Matthews, who is ready to force everyone to be cavity searched in the ticket line:

Matthews: You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don't do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you've got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane's safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don't own the right to be on that plane because you're getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights...And by the way, Cliff, you know it and I know it, they're going to get smarter and smarter and sooner or later they're going to get all kinds of people to do their dirty work for them. They're the enemy. They're going to use any means they can to get us. They're out to kill us. Let's be as smart as they are because they are already smart.

Run fer yer lives!

Apparently, Matthews thinks that there is some Koranic law that requires all attacks against America to take place on an airplane. If some terrorist with imagination succeeds in a mall or on a bridge will we have to submit to profiliong and screening there too? Sounds like it.(And if he thinks these would-be terrorists like Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab are super criminals, no wonder he's petrified.)

And that's why we hate Chris Matthews -- because he's not stupid. He's not even a craven political opportunist like Pete Hoekstra, trying to pull in campaign cash from a bunch of unemployed people in Michigan who can no longer afford to fly anywhere but who can't see a connection between the money squandered by the Bush Administration on pointless and badly-conducted wars and the fact that they have no health care. He's a media opportunist, and that may be worse.

(cross-posted at Brilliant at Breakfast.)