Chris Matthews is an Idiot

Chris Matthews has spent the past couple of days decrying the tendency of politicians to “spout BS” and even finished today with a “Let Me Finish” segment on the subject. He takes pride in nailing people who do that sort of thing on his program, of course, but only when such BS runs counter to his narrative of the moment.

For instance he is promoting the “health care reform” legislation as a historic moment, so when Debbie Wasserman-Schultz declared that the legislation had not done anything so heinous as to force anyone to buy health insurance against their will, but merely created some new income tax wrinkles along the lines of marriage, home ownership, or having children, his only response was, “Okay.”

Today he was hyperventilating about terrorists destroying an American city with a nuclear weapon, and had as guest Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund who said, among other things,

“Osama bin Laden is about 60 kilometers away from nuclear weapons material. If something happens to that government, if it destabilizes, he‘s going to make a run for those weapons.”

If Cirincione knows where Osama bin Laden is to within a kilometer, he’s doing a lot better than our combined intelligence services. Osama bin Laden may, in fact, be dead but if not he is supposedly in a territory of several hundred thousand square miles, the southern border of which is 60km from the capital of Pakistan. Of course the nuclear weapons material is not stored at that capital, it is dispersed some distance away, and that 60km consists of nearly impenetratable mountain range. Not to mention that regardless of the state of the government, the military of Pakistan consists of some 550,000 very well armed dudes who are going to take a very dim view of Osama bin Laden swanning off with their nuclear weapons.

So Cirincione spins a very scary story which is utter bullshit, but it suits the narrative that Matthews is promoting, so he calls him on none of it. Chris Matthews is opposed to bullshit, okay, but only when it runs against his chosen narrative.