Matthews: Tea Party Activists Are Like Nazi SS, When Will They Start Wearing Uniforms?

MSNBC host Chris Matthews yesterday compared Tea Party activists to the Nazi SS thugs of the 1930s and wondered when they will start wearing uniforms.

His comments were made during a "Hardball" segment concerning on the MoveOn.org activist who was stomped on by a Rand Paul supporter earlier this week.

This is the “kind of stuff we saw from hoodlums in the '30s in another country I will not mention,” he said. “What is this behavior by American political activists where they now arrest people, stomp them? These are supposed to be people who are just good old American tea partiers.”

Matthews also talked about what happened in Alaska when security for GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller briefly detained a blogger.

“I gotta wonder when people are gonna start wearing uniforms. I mean they've got an army out there in Alaska of militia people. You've got these guys going around acting like street thugs. I mean it isn't far from what we saw in the thirties, where all of a sudden, political parties started showing up in uniform.”

Here is the AP video:

@ Yahoo!7 Video

Conservatives have said that eyewitness reported Valle was lunging at Rand Paul, trying to shove a sign in his face and start trouble. They have pointed to this video for their evidence.

Daily Kos Founder Moulitsas Responds to Chris Matthews' Comments

Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas took on Chris Matthews today, albeit on MSNBC's "The Ed Show." Here is his conversation with Ed Schultz.

Chris Matthews: Obama Spoke at the 'Enemy Camp' at West Point

Chris Matthews of MSNBC yesterday described the cadets and soldiers listening to President Barack Obama at West Point as "the enemy camp." It's a stunning description of volunteers willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our country.

Chris Matthews: It's My Job to Make Sure Obama's Presidency Works

Chris Matthews announced today that it's his job as a commentator to make sure president-elect Barack Obama succeed as president.

"Well you know what, I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work," he told Joe Scarborourgh on air on MSNBC. "That's my job. My job is to help my country. ... to make this work successfully because this country needs a successful presidency."

Most commentators and journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs of the government and advocates for the common man. This is a unique perspective from Matthews, the ideal that it is his role to do everything he can to make the presidency work for the good of the country. He certainly didn't have that view during the presidency of George Bush.

Chris Matthews Ethics Breach: Interviews Daughter But Does Not Tell Viewers

Chris Matthews apparently interviewed his daughter Caroline before the debates on "Hardball" but failed to tell his viewers of his relationship with her, FishbowlDC reported yesterday. This is a Journalism 101 breach of ethics.

One tipster told FishbowlDC that "Matthews, at the asking of his daughter, instructed the producers not to name her."

The reason this is a breech of ethics is that Matthews has a conflict of interest. His daughter had a political point to make about an organization she is a member of. Its web site was promoted during the interview. The interview under normal circumstances, while quite soft and ordinary, would have been fine, but his viewers deserve to know that she was his daughter appearing on his show to promote her political point of view.

MSNBC Drops Olbermann, Matthews From Anchor Chairs

MSNBC's grand experiment of using liberal commentators Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as news anchors during the network's election coverage appears to be over, reports Brian Stelter of The New York Times tonight on its web site.

After accusations of on-camera bias, and some animosity between the cable network and NBC, network executives decided over the weekend to replace the pair with David Gregory as the news anchor on election night and during the debates, Stelter writes. Olbermann and Matthews will appear as commentators.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin, as quoted in the report.

A portion of Stelter's report is as follows:

Executives at the channel’s parent company, NBC Universal, had high hopes for MSNBC’s coverage of the political conventions. Instead, the coverage frequently descended into on-air squabbles between the anchors, embarrassing some workers at NBC’s news division, and quite possibly alienating viewers. Although MSNBC nearly doubled its total audience compared with the 2004 conventions, its competitive position did not improve, as it remained in last place among the broadcast and cable news networks. In prime time, the channel averaged 2.2 million viewers during the Democratic convention and 1.7 million viewers during the Republican convention.

The success of the Fox News Channel in the past decade along with the growth of political blogs have convinced many media companies that provocative commentary attracts viewers and lures Web browsers more than straight news delivered dispassionately.

“In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Fighting the ratings game, he added, “the bottom line is that we’re experiencing incredible success.”

But as the past two weeks have shown, that success has a downside. When the vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin lamented media bias during her speech, attendees of the Republican convention loudly chanted “NBC.”

In interviews, 10 current and former staff members said that long-simmering tensions between MSNBC and NBC reached a boiling point during the conventions. “MSNBC is behaving like a heroin addict,” one senior staff member observed. “They’re living from fix to fix and swearing they’ll go into rehab the next week.”

The issue may have come to a head when Olbermann, acting as the Republican convention anchor, apologized for the network for broadcasting a video tribute to the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Here is a tape of that comment, along with the tribute that was aired:



"I'm sorry, it's necessary to say this and I wanted to separate myself from the others on the air about this," he said on air, looking shaken. "If at this late date, any television network had of its own accord showed that much videotape, and that much graphic videotape of 9/11, and I speak as somebody who lost a few friends there, it, we, would be rightly eviscerated at all quarters, perhaps by the Republican Party itself, for exploiting the memories of the dead and perhaps even for trying to evoke that pain again. If you reacted to that videotape the way I did, I apologize. It is a subject of great pain for many of us still and was probably not appropriate to be shown. We'll continue in a moment."

The statement was widely praised by liberal bloggers and commentators, and widely criticized by conservatives.

Olbermann told The New York Times today that that moment — and the perception that he is “not utterly neutral” — reignited the debate about his role on political nights.

“I found it ironic and instructive that I could have easily said exactly what I did say, exactly when I did say it, if I had been wearing a different hat, and nobody would have taken any issue,” he told the Times.

Fiery Debut for Palin; NBC Not Impressed

Taking on the Washington media establishment, as well as Barack Obama, Sarah Palin's fiery speech before the Republican National Convention last night put the country on notice: She's here to stay, and she can hold her own on the national stage.

The party faithful welcomed her with a long thundering round of applause as she took the stage. Her speech was enthusiastically interrupted with cheers as she took stabs at Obama and the media:

"I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country." -- Excerpt from Palin's speech.

"There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state Senate," -- Palin's speech.

"But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot, what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger, take more of your money, give you more orders from Washington and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy, our opponent is against producing it."

While the convention was thrilled with her speech, some members of the media had a hard time dealing with it, especially at the criticism leveled against them.



Geoffrey Dickens, writing for newsbusters.org this morning, summerized NBC's position:

During MSNBC's Wednesday night live coverage of the Republican National Convention Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Tom Brokaw and others scoffed at the idea they had an anti-Sarah Palin agenda. Brokaw depicted the charge of liberal bias as a mere "tactic," by the GOP, Matthews played it off as just "an old, old conflict," and even tried to write off the media's fascination of Obama, as just a mere fondness of "the new." Brokaw dismissed the contention of any real liberal bias:

This is a political tactic on their part. And the shorthand is, "Let's go after the media." And are they sorting out, for example, Fox or conservative blogs or others who have, in fact, been defending all of this? No what they want to do is just raise the specter that everything that America sees is controlled by a tiny band of Eastern liberal elites.

And for her part Norah O'Donnell insisted:

There is one important thing to point out. The media is not attacking Sarah Palin. The media has done investigative pieces, in their job, about the way Sarah Palin was chosen.

Reaction to Hillary's Speech Mixed

It seems that the media is giving mixed reviews to Hillary Clinton's speech last night in Denver. The party's faithful is on board, but others are not so sure.

The California Yankee, for instance, says:

Hillary gave a good speech, but it needed to be a great speech. It was a concession speech, perhaps the speech Hillary should have given in June.

Hillary's speech should have been the equivalent of a nomination speech. I didn't hear that. What I heard was a heartfelt thank you to Hillary's "sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits." There was no Obama-like oratorical knock them dead explanation of why Obama has to be president.

More important, Hillary didn't offer a rebuttal to defuse her devastating critique of Obama's lack of experience.

One blogger didn't see much other than "it's all about me":

The reasons that Hillary gave for supporting Obama were all ways of saying that Obama is a Democrat. She managed to say some nice “words” about Obama in her speech (she was proud to support him), but subsequently she immediately launched into a litany of the many important issues for which she’d fought and sang out with a paean to all the people who had placed their faith in her.

In the end, it came down to being all about her.

On the other hand, here's a news flash. Hold on to you hats. Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow loved it. Olbermann once again goes just a wee bit over the top (He couldn''t have written it better himself!):



Here is Clinton's speech. It's about 27 minutes long.



CNN talked to a DNC delegate who is a Hillary supporter immediately after Clinton's speech. In an emotional response to a question about who she is going to vote for, she could not give her support to Obama.



If someone like her was not convinced after seeing Hillary speak live, who did Hillary touch last night? Did anyone on the fence change their mind? Will the 18 million people who voted and campaigned for Hillary over the past 12 months switch gears and join the Obama camp? We won't know the answer to that until November.

Biden in 2004 Urged Kerry to Pick McCain as VP

Appearing on "Meet the Press" back in 2004, Sen. Joe Biden had urged Sen. John Kerry to select McCain as his running mate. Here is a story that ran on MSNBC's web site:

WASHINGTON - Sen. Joseph Biden, a senior Democrat, on Sunday urged Republican Sen. John McCain to run for vice president with the Democratic hopeful, Sen. John Kerry, in order to heal the “vicious rift” dividing America.

McCain, of Arizona, “categorically” ruled out standing with Kerry, but Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had no second choice.

“I’m sticking with McCain,” Biden said.

“I think John McCain would be a great candidate for vice president,” Biden, from Delaware, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where the two senators appeared together to take questions on Iraq and other subjects.

“Do I think it’s going to happen? No,” he said. “But I think it is a reflection of the desire of this country and the desire of people in both parties to want to see this God-awful, vicious rift that exists in the nation healed, and John and John could go a long way to heal in that rift.”

Two months earler, Biden appeared on Chris Matthews' Hardball and made the same pitch.

Drudge: It's Bayh; MSNBC: Bet on Biden

UPDATE4: Most every news organization by 11 p.m. Eastern has discredited the reports on Bayh, saying high-level sources in the Obama campaign have information that the senator from Indiana has been told that he is not the vice presidential selection.


The Drudge Report said this afternoon that:

KMBC's Micheal Mahoney reports a company in Kansas City, which specializes in political literature, has been printing Obama-Bayh material... MORE... Gill Studios, would not confirm information about the material. They would not deny it either. At least three sources close to the plant's operations reported the Obama-Bayh material was being produced.

KMBC's site is here. Sen. Evan Bayh's Senate page is here.

UPDATE2: Here is Bayh's Oct. 8, 2002 speech on the Senate floor strongly supporting the war resolution. Ironically, Sen. John McCain questions him during the debate:



UPDATE3: Here is a rundown of Bayh's stances on the issues. NARAL gave him a 100 percent rating in 2007. And Carl Hulse of The New York Times earlier this month gave him a moderate-to-conservative rating in a story headlined: Indiana Senator Offers Obama Risks and Rewards

UPDATE: Bob Shrum, Pat Buchanan and Andrea Mitchell, while all three appeared on Chris Matthews' Hardball just minutes ago, all said the smart money is on Sen. Joe Biden. Biden's offical site is here. Here is a rundown of Biden's stances on the issues.