(Love the alliteration on that.)
Everyone should watch Hardball tonight if they can, or try to find an excerpt online. I'm still speechless at what I saw, given the source of the attack. He absolutely threw the book at her for defending the administration's entire Iraq war policy, from the original dishonest and discredited justifications to its implementation. He wouldn't let her get in a word edgewise, and when he was finally through and she tried to respond to what she called his "2 minute rant", he cut her off and broke to commercial.
In case anyone doesn't know who
Torie (Victoria) Clarke is, she's a professional GOP shill who was Donald Rumsfeld's press secretary during the first few years of Bush's first term. Her background is in media and public relations, and in the past she's worked for Brent Bozell and Tucker Eskew's PR firm. She just came out with a book called
Lipstick on a Pig, subtitled--I'm dead serious--"Winning In the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game".
Oh. My. God. She's literally claiming that today's news climate is transparent, and that it's impossible to spin successfully. Help! Wake me up! I'm lost in a Kakfa novel!
While I admire his willingness to go after Clarke tonight and dispense with all the usuall Bush adulation, I just don't get Matthews. Most of the time he's either spouting nonsense or shilling for the GOP, but every once in the while, he takes them on full-blast. Maybe he's bipolar, or has MPD or some other personality disorder. But this was a solid shot across the GOP ship 'o spin's bow that I've never seen from the MSM, let alone one of the more GOP-friendly members of it.
I suspect that his motivation might come from the ongoing Muslim cartoon protests, and perhaps the recent Hamas election victory. I think he's finally "getting" the real-world effects of the Iraq war and Bush's preemptive militaristic policy of dealing with terrorism that has turned the Muslim world against us.
More to the point, he might be afraid that, being in the press and having been a fairly strong supporter of Bush's foreing policy, he himself might feel the ire of this blowback personally. Perhaps he's gotten death threats or scary emails and voice mails, or what he thinks might be strange looks from the everyday Arab and Muslim people he sees on the street--not to mention the sneering looks and emails he's no doubt gotten from leftie bloggers recently.
And maybe it suddenly also occured to him that perhaps he too has been the target of these wiretaps, and that Rove might use some of this intel against him if he doesn't kiss Bush's ass at every opportunity--and instead of falling in line, finally developing a spine. (Yeah, right.)
Another possible explanation is that he senses that the tide is finally turning against Bush, and is just making sure to be on the right (er, left) side in cashing in on the shift in mood.
In any case, it was refreshing to see, and let's hope it's the start of a trend in the media.
(Ok, sorry, I seem to have gotten my head stuck up my ass when I typed that last sentence.)