Looks like we have to do this again.

It's been almost a year to the day since I last posted, and what a year it's been!  But here we are, in September 2016, another presidential election is upon us, and the candidates are an autocratic thug who admires Vladimir Putin, a well-qualified and well-known woman who just happens to carry the last name of "Clinton", which means that the right is on its quadriennial conspiracy theory binge, and in the third party category, we have a would-be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces who doesn't know what Aleppo is (but favors legal pot) and Tofu Palin.

So what inspired me to let my Hate Flag fly for Chris Matthews again?  Watch for yourself.  Watch what he lets Rudy Ghouliani (sic) get away with, with hardly a rebuttal.  Because in 2016, if you have demonstrable truth being compared against utter horseshit, the two are treated as having equal validity.  

A leopard never changes his spots

Hello, strangers!

So it's three years later, and MSNBC has decided that it's given the liberal wonkocracy enough time to try to catch up to the reality TV of CNN and the unreality TV of Fox.  So it's decided to move back to the right a bit.

We're not quite at "Alan Keyes Is Making Sense" level yet (though I would not rule out the possibility of a medical show with Ben Carson if he doesn't get the GOP nod this year), but even the great Rachel Maddow has been relegated to the All Donald Trump All The Time beat.

It's hard to say what's more embarrassing about this clip:  Chris Matthews demonstrating that he really doesn't have a clue about what Bernie Sanders stands for, his reference to "vaudeville", which is clearly code for "Jewish", or the fact that a comedian, Bill Maher, has to lecture him about how far he and his network have strayed from not just journalism, but even intelligent commentary.

It's been a long time, but just when you thought Tweety had learned something...

It just goes to show you, we should never, ever let our guard down with people like Tweety:

Reporting from the big cable TV industry event this week, Broadcasting & Cable's Andrea Morabito writes (5/22/12):

Hardball host Chris Matthews argued that because of the rise of opinion-based news networks, the non-critical aspect of the media is gone, going as far to say that the reporting that verified the U.S. administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002 would not happen today because of cable news.

"I would like to think there would be a reckoning we didn’t have then because of modern media," Matthews said. "24/7 is good because it's not only breadth, it's depth. Without cable, it is just network [television] thinking, embedded thinking, which is dangerous in a democracy."

Umm… He's aware of the fact that cable news channels existed in 2002, right?

In fact, here's some of what he and his cable colleagues were doing:

September 25, 2002

—MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews asks of World Bank/IMF protests in Washington DC: "Those people out in the streets, do they hate America?" Conservative pundit Cliff May responds: "Yes, I'm afraid a lot of them do. They hate America. They align themselves with Saddam Hussein. They align themselves with terrorists all over the world." Hardball correspondent David Shuster later adds that "anti-Americanism is in the air."

(via Digby)

Maybe Chris Matthews should give his salary to David Broder too

Heather over at C&L had the intestinal fortitude to watch Hardball the other night and caught this little gem.

Why can't Tweety do this more often?

It's easy for Chris Matthews to be hard on random idiots like Rick Barber who talk about less government while angling for a government paycheck. Why can't he be this tough on those already entrenched in Washington?

Uh, Tweety? If you knew anything about Scott Garrett you'd know he IS a wingnut

On Tuesday, Tweety declared that Rep. Scott Garrett, lunatic right Congressman from NJ-5, isn't one of those "wackys" in the Republican Party:

I know all about Scott Garrett, because he's my Congressman. I've worked on three different campaigns to oust him. Scott Garrett keeps getting re-elected because the populous part of his district, Bergen County, is a party-line-voting district in which the majority is registered as Republican. Marge Roukema was our representative for 25 years, and she was the kind of moderate Republican that today Jim DeMint would drum right out of the party.

Garrett is a doctrinaire conservative who opposes extensions of unemployment benefits, relief for victims of natural disasters, and anything in opposition to the Tom DeLay/Jim DeMint/Looney DeLooney ideology of I Got Mine and Fuck You.

Matthews once again shows himself to be an uninformed idiot.

(h/t)

OMG, you mean the President is BLACK?????

For ONE WHOLE HOUR, Chris Matthews forgot that Barack Obama is black:

Where do you even start? The sad thing is that Tweety makes a good comment here about how the Republicans are nothing other than "someone else". They have no ideas, no plans, no agenda for running this country, other than letting entropy take over. But that the first thing that ran through his head was that the President is black? What has he been doing, putting paper cutouts of George Bush's head over Obama's face? And what's this with Tessio and Clemenza? Tweety really needs to stop playing SOTU drinking games.