Chris Matthews gets on my last nerve. MSNBC’s resident motormouth was worse than usual on Inauguration Day, the low point being his refusal to end one of his interminable, repetitive stories as poet Elizabeth Alexander began reciting Praise Song for the Day. He actually talked over her briefly; by the time his colleagues shut him up — they should have sedated him — I was clicking to CNN.
I griped to a few friends that he needs to learn it’s not always about Him, Him, Him. One of them, syndicated radio’s Jim Bohannon, mentioned having given Matthews some of his earliest national exposure with an interview way back when. The small cluster of my brain cells marked Satire imagined what that might have been like and Jim enjoyed it enough to suggest I post it, giving permission to use his name. So I am.
JB: My next guest is Chris Matthews, who –
CM: Hey, thanks, great to be here. We’ve met, haven’t we? Maybe we met in line at a movie do you know I’m a film buff? You know that scene in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington –
JB: And he joins us from –
CM: Phiwadelphia, I love Phiwadelphia, d’you know Eddie Rendell? Rendell? Old friend, we cut our teeth in Phiwadelphia and that was before Tom Hanks made that movie. Remember that movie? Phiwadelphia? Where he was the gay guy and was dying? Great movie, I love movies did I tell you I love movies and –
JB: And he’s just –
CM: I love sports too baseball. How ’bout those Phiwwies? Phiwadelphia Phiwwies! Geez, if I don’t get a chance to mention my book, my agent’s going to be upset hey you know FiewdofDreams that baseball movie that was a book first and Kevin Costner was so great, I mean great, and so was Ray Liotta when he came strolling out of the cornfiewd and his line about hating Ty Cobb – HA! – and it was so true they did hate the SOB and that’s what makes Amerrca so great. Phiwadelphia, baseball, movies, dreams, cornfiewds and hating Ty Cobb, no pun intended. HA! Get it? Corn? Cobb? Fiewd? HA!
JB: We’re out of time.
Yes, I exaggerated. But not by much. When I looked for a clip of Matthews’s HA! to post here, I found instead this shortie of him from January 9 last year, the night Hillary Clinton upset Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary.
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The liberal response to Bill O’Reilly.
Two wrongs don’t make anything right or palatable about either one of these self-proclaimed “journalists.”
And Keith Olbermann’s not much better, either, despite all his oogling over Murrow.
Word Bandit’s last blog post..We The People
I’m not willing to canonize Murrow, as so many are, but on a bad day he left the ones you mention in the shade. His wartime reporting from London broke ground and even in the 50’s, when he was reduced to doing an interview show, he was amazing (to judge by some shows I saw at the Museum of Broadcasting) and urbane but never forgot that his viewers tuned in to hear what the guests had to say.
I remember when Hardball was new, some 9 years ago or so, and even then Matthews didn’t know when to shut up. He’s had plenty of time to learn.
Matthews is liberal??? Y’all gots no sensa proportion down there.
raincoaster’s last blog post..The Real Secret: the greatest motivational video of all time
Hi, rain! I try telling people your most conservative pols are more liberal than our most liberal and even after they clean the wax out of their ears, they don’t believe me. Must be the way I tell it.
lol ella, let us know for sure, when you’re taking it to prime time.
I get twitchy if I surf within one channel of Chris Matthews. It’s a sort of sixth sense, I guess.
HA! That’s a good sixth sense, sage. I’ll tell you, I nearly choked when I clicked on that video after what I’d written. How does he do it?