You know, if ‘Hardball’ had been scheduled to go into a college auditiorium and had changed the venue at the last minute to find a ‘less biased’ audience for the President’s speech, you guys on the anti-war side would be screaming about it. And you know it.
Some of you don’t seem to realize how authoritarian you’re becoming. It just pains you that there happened to be a Bush-friendly audience there, doesn’t it? That can’t be right! Someone should stop these overt displays of support! Obviously, it’s a conspiracy and Chris Matthews is just another flunky of the right-wing war machine.
You won’t be happy until the opposing viewpoint has been completely silenced.
Heh. I was once walking up to the entrance of the local mall when I spotted a camera crew standing by the doorway. A very pretty female reporter hailed me and said, “Would you like to be on TV?” I said “No” and kept walking. The shocked look on her face was priceless.
Well, that occurred when I was still living in France, but I find it hard to beleive things would be much different here.
Re: the OP; tried to watch Hardball a couple times some years ago, got a headache from all the shouting, decided there was no added value, and have never tuned in since.
It’s not enough for you just be full of shit. You have to let that shit develop and ferment over time to become sweet wine shit.
MSNBC can broadcast whatever it wants. But to have people like you screaming about the liberal bias of the media when the way cable news works is pretty much a consistent blow-job for the President’s style of media management is definately something people can legitimately bitch about. This was a major policy address that got weakass coverage, with none of the important questions addressed, occasional ineffectual analysis (more about the pony-show of politics than actual events), and unchallenged right-wing framing. Get over it.
Here is a snippet from today’s Daily Howler that makes it pretty clear that Tweety in no way, shape, or form tried to challenge the assumptions of his audience.
"PANDERS FOR PATRIOTS, INSULTS FOR DEMS: Chris Matthews’ post-speech performance last night was little short of appalling. The talker broadcast from Nashville’s Two Rivers Baptist Church, part of Hardball’s new “church tour” (we think this is a good idea). But you know Chris! He was quickly talking phony church talk (phony for him), pandering to the congregation and pretending to be fully churched. By the end, he was fawning furiously. Most of the congregation were pro-war and pro-Bush. And of course, that made them “patriotic:”
MATTHEWS (6/28/05): Welcome back to Two Rivers Baptist Church here in Nashville, Tennessee, our town hall meeting on the presidents speech tonight. I want to go to our host tonight [Pastor Jerry Sutton]. Its great to have you, by the way, host to us.
SUTTON: Our pleasure.
MATTHEWS: Its been a great group. As you can see, the people are passionate. And they have strong patriotic beliefs and moral beliefs, and yet its been very nice here. No fights or anything.
I have to say it`s been very nice. And I mean that seriously. Why do you think the people in this part of the country seem to be more manifestly patriotic about this president, and this war, and this situation? What do you think it is, the separation from the coasts?
If you’re pro-war, you’re “more patriotic”—you haven’t been sullied by “the coasts.” Luckily, Sutton isn’t a fake like his host. He chose more appropriate language:
SUTTON (continuing directly): My goodness, thats a hard question. MATTHEWS: Because I can tell that its overwhelmingly for the war here, and yet the national polls are about 50-50. This isn`t 50-50 country.
SUTTON: No, this is a very conservative city and actually a very conservative congregation. A lot of these folks are church people.
Showing respect for other views, Sutton simply called his group “very conservative.” Matthews, trolling for conservative viewers, found a better words: “patriotic.”"
Yeah, and Chris Matthews also got Zell Miller to challenge him to a duel because he (Matthews) dared to challenge Zell on the facts of his fire-breathing speech at the RNC.
Sometimes jouralists are nice to their guests. Sometimes they ask tough questions. Even 60 Minutes sometimes does softball pieces. That’s the nature of the business.
Seriously, I’m pretty damned liberal, and I’ve watched Hardball for a few years now, fairly faithfully. In the weird alternate universe in which Chris Matthews is a tool of the Bush administration, Ann Coulter is my best friend and we’re sharing diet tips and trading autographed pictures of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.
Matthews does play nice sometimes with guests, and then sometimes he shouts because they won’t shut up and answer the damned questions that he’s asking, but instead go off on some tangent in which they’re dodging the question. I find him intelligent, somewhat left-leaning, and not more inclined to give liberal/Democrat guests any more slack than he does to conservative/Republican guests.
BTW, I was in error when I stated earlier that Hardball is doing shows on religion in America all week. Maybe it was just Mon & Tues, as Chris had Howard Dean on today. But that doesn’t change the main argument-- that the show was set in advance and they just decided to go with it despite the President’s speech.
If you had a chance to catch Dean, he was at his best: Intelligent, articulate, making logical arguments and NOT insulting anyone (despite Chris’ obvious attempts to bait him into doing so). Chris seems to think he scored a journalistic coup by getting Dean to admit that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a “blunder”. Dean’s been saying that all along.
Thanks John. This answers my WTF. Did he mention that at the beginning? Maybe I missed it. What I remember him saying was that this was “America’s first reaction to the President’s speech.” Or something like that about midway through.
Yeah, but this wasn’t about two Tucker Carlson’s to only one Paul Begala or something like that. This was a panel full of extremists in front of a fundamentalist congregation. Fundamentalists are only about 7% of the country, so bear in mind that 80+% of Republicans would consider these people too conservative.
To me though the biggest problem with the show is that most viewers wouldn’t have had a clue who the FRC or the Eagle Forum or who that Pastor were. Or who the audience there was. What I saw looked like total misrepresentation to me - especially, as I said, since he presented it as “America’s reaction to the President”.
I totally agree, but there was none of that in the show.
Oh my God I didn’t even catch the irony - it’s delicious.
Well apparently Americans don’t think he’s middle of the road since he’s always presented as a spokesman for the right everywhere he goes *in America *.
As for far right or not - that I’ll grant you I should rethink. He’s not so much an extreme ideologue as an extreme partisan. Not so much “far right wing” as “very right wing” .
Perhaps the Rev’s mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be. He should’ve said, “If he did, I wish he’d whack you upside the head with his bat for being such an ass-kissing self promoter”.
