Why He's Called Tweety

I actually like Chris Matthews, and watch Hardball regularly, but he can be and rather frequently is an utter idiot. He never seems to know when he is making a complete fool of himself. Well, according to my wife, neither do I so I guess I shouldn’t be too critical, but at least I don’t do whatever it is on national television.

Tweety’s obsession with Sarah Palin is downright embarrassing. He alone in the news world thinks that she is hiding an innate superior political acumen and that she will, at the appropriate time, dazzle the entire political world with it. I’m not sure, and I don’t think that the organ he is thinking with is his brain. He claims that, “she knows exactly what she’s doing when she lets her eyes go up in the air.” Yeah, Chris, so does a high school prom queen when she unbuttons her top button. She’s getting adolescent newsmen to start pole vaulting around the newsroom.

Then he awards the “first ever Hardball Award” to Roland Burris for having the “moxie to stand up and demand what is rightfully yours.”

Burris had to know, and was undoubtedly told by more than one person, that his acceptance of and insistence upon this Senate seat would create embarrassment for his party and his president-elect, and that it would distract and detract from the momentous events leading up to an historic inauguration. That he desired so badly to sit in the Senate for two years to be willing to have all of that happen for his own personal gain is hardly worthy of any kind of award.

Then yesterday he was thrilled by the “passion” with which George W. Bush delivered his self-defense in his final press conference. He admitted that the President was wrong and that much of what he said was utterly detached from reality, but he admired the manner in which all of that self-aggrandizing crap was delivered and was thrilled by the event.

Chris Matthews greatest failing, in my eyes, is that he expresses great admiration and affection for people who engage in the most gross form of destructive and dishonest self-promotion. He seems utterly unable to see through the most gauzy veneer of absolute bullshit. I will never forget (or forgive) the “thrills that ran up his leg” as George W. Bush strutted on the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring “Mission Accomplished” when anyone who had read even the American corporate media knew that Iraq was about to descend into chaos.

More than the moment, Tweety, context has meaning.