“Hardball” host Chris Matthews likened the Republican Party’s quest to nominate more conservative politicians to Josef Stalin’s murder of twenty million innocent people.
Geoffrey Dickens has the transcript:
MATTHEWS: Coming up what happens to Republicans who don’t march to the right wing tune? Well they’re getting purged. This is Stalinesque, this stuff.
[…]
MATTHEWS: Chris it seems to me we’re getting into something here that I do think is particularly nasty. Chuck says there’s precedence, and there may well be, but here you see a party basically pruning itself. Going around and saying, “Well we really don’t like Arlen Specter. You go find something else to do. Go be a Democrat.” We see this with Charlie Crist perhaps being given the boot. Bob Bennett, a real conservative, getting perhaps the boot out in Utah at some point in this process this year. And then of course John McCain who was the Republican nominee for president last time around. All being treated like, well, you know, like tissue rejection, like “You don’t belong here.”
We’ve likely reached the point where pointing out the outrageous and stupid things that Chris Matthews says is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. But I seem to remember him being a serious and likable political commentator as recently as a decade ago. What happened?
And, granting that his show — once the crown jewel of MSNBC’s lineup — now airs in the middle of the afternoon to an audience of housewives and shut-ins, why is he still on the air? I hear Ron Reagan’s itching to get back on TV. And there’s always Tucker Carlson.
