Michelle Malkin discusses her appearance on yesterday’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” It’s a rather stunning display although, frankly, not all that surprising at this stage. Matthews, who touts himself as “one of Washington’s most respected journalists” on his (actually, fairly watchable) eponymous Sunday show, turned “Hardball” into a foam-a-thon some time back.
I used to watch the show and found Matthews engaging if a bit immature. Somewhere along the line, though, he changed the format and started packing more guests into each episode and began barking questions in rapid fire mode, cutting them off, and basically turning the show into a vehicle to spout his non-existent brilliance. The “Saturday Night Live” spoof of the show is only barely a parody. Obviously, it isn’t working all that well as the show went from being, so far as I know, reasonably popular to relegation into the hinterland of mid-afternoon television.
Oddly, as alluded to earlier, Matthew’s half hour weekend show is pretty good. I caught an episode a few months back after learning that Andrew Sullivan would be on and have been TiVo’ing it regularly since. Matthews is still mildly annoying, but he gets solid guests on and lets them speak.
When talking heads shows de-generate into shoutfests, they become unwatchable. I quit watching “The McLaughlin Group” and “Crossfire,” both one-time must-sees, years ago. I watched “Hardball” more recently but can’t remember the last time I intentionally caught an episode.
Update (2248): Apparently, this episode was a boon for Michelle: The post has 82 TrackBacks and counting!
