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Academic

: Essentially Contested America

Is Chris Matthews a Bill O'Reilly Clone?

By Robert Justin Lipkin

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There may have been a time when Chris Matthews was a serious journalist, but that time has receded into the distant past. The raison d'etre of his MSNBC show "Hardball" is to ask questions other journalists won't ask and insist upon getting his guests to answer them. All well and good. But for the last several months at least Matthews seems to be degenerating into a rude, unreflective, even at times vicious clone of Bill O'Reilly. Matthews rarely allows his guests to finish their thoughts; he interrupts them incessantly except when he agrees with or likes a particular guest. One conspicuous feature of his faux journalism is his continual ridicule of anything Clinton. While I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton, his despicable treatment of her is beyond the pale. Now he's taken the ridicule to a new dimension. He unapologetically contends that the only reason Hilary Clinton won her New York Senate race was because her husband messed around. Watch and listen.

Of course, like most craven dissemblers, Matthews then back-peddled. He audaciously claims that it is simply a historical fact that Hillary Clinton's political career clearly derives from her husband's philandering, nothing else. (The last refuge of a cornered scoundrel is to insist that his view is supported by historical facts. Of course, history becomes what Matthews thinks it is.) In responding to the indignant reaction by the women on the "The view" Matthews compounds his infamy by asserting: "If any of the women on that show [the View] want to take me on on historic political information ... let's talk political history. Let's talk facts, not opinions, facts, and I'll take them on." Click here and scroll down to a revealing video of the January 11th edition of "Morning Joe" where Matthews, by phone, takes his ridiculous obduracy a step further. In this piece Matthews reveals once again his dogmatic arrogance about the facts of why Hillary Clinton became a U.S. Senator from New York, not on the merits but out of sympathy as if Mr. Hardball had cornered the market on historical facts. How he knows the reasons why millions of New Yorkers voted for Clinton is truly mystifying. Only someone who can't see beyond his own severely blinkered perceptions could make such a claim; someone remarkably like Bill O'Reilly, and for that matter, Mr. Bush. I am no subjectivist or relativist. But Matthews needs to realize that people experience the world through different perspectives. The goal of a rational person is to attempt to see things through the eyes of one's opponents and to factor into one's own perspective information that challenges what one sees "clearly" to be "historical fact." Matthews is not alone in this irrationality, but he sure is a good example of how not to formulate reasonable, plausible, reflective historical explanations of political events.

Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on January 14, 2008 (boomark / email).