Occasionally there comes a time when one of the mainstays of the national media crystallizes your assessment of current events to such an extent that you feel he or she is actually channeling your thoughts. This was the case on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday afternoon. So unexpected and complete was Matthews’ indictment of the Republicans that I almost felt like leaping out of my chair with unbounded glee.
Matthews had invited former New York Governor George Pataki to address the constant drumbeat of criticism of President Obama on almost every single issue his administration has confronted since he entered office. Pataki himself had added to the Republican effort, only days before, when he criticized the administration on the attempted Time Square bombing:
This is another case where this administration -- we are responding after something is attempted. We saw it with the Christmas Day airplane bomber. We saw it in Times Square. We were lucky in both cases. And then we saw it in Ft. Hood, where we were not so lucky and 13 of our great young heroes who put their lives on the line to defend us were murdered. And I think this administration just has got to change its approach.
The Governor was asked a fundamental question.
MATTHEWS: So governor, the Obama administration, the New York Police Department, nobody deserves any credit for catching the bad guy... within 53 hours of the crime?
PATAKI: Chris, absolutely. They deserve a lot of credit -- the citizens, the street vendors, the NYPD, the NY Fire Department and the Obama administration -- for catching them so quickly. I give them kudos for that. But the point is that we're talking about the response, and what government needs to do more of is prevent these terrorists from getting so close in the first place.
Well, Mr. Pataki, here is a brief reminder of terrorist or attempted terrorist attacks that George W. Bush responded to after they were attempted.
2001 - 9/11 attacks on NYC, Pentagon
2001 Richard Reid shoe bombing
2001-2002 Anthrax attacks
2002 Attack at LAX against El Al ticket counter
2005 Hughes & Dunahoe firebomb abortion clinic
2005 Abortion clinic in Palm Beach burned
2006 SUV attack at UNC
2006 Seattle Jewish Federation shooting
2007 IEDs tossed at Mexican Consulate in NYC
2007 Altman & Baca arrested for the abortion clinic arson
2007 Planned Parenthood arson in Virginia Beach, Virginia
2007 IED attacked attempted at women's health clinic in Austin
Matthews began to build his case. He presented a video of Rush Limbaugh accusing the President of dividing America, claiming that the administration is not of this country, and that Obama’s real enemies are in Arizona and not in Iran. To top it all off, the bellicose mouthpiece of the Republican Party added this:
My friends, this regime in its day-to-day actions is far more Nazi-like than any identification law...
He returned to Pataki:
MATTHEWS: You know, Governor, I've always respected you as a sort of a common-sense guy, somewhere in the middle, somewhere toward the right, depending on what's going on. And yet I can't find any Republican -- center, center right or right -- who will take on this guy, Limbaugh, this tub of whatever.
His description of Limbaugh as "This tub of whatever" was worth the price of admission. Matthews went on to offer video evidence of other Republican leaders such as Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, all attacking the President:
MATTHEWS: Well, your crowd won't give him a break. He created almost 300,000 -- the American economy did -- let's get that straight -- created almost 300,000 new jobs, the highest production of jobs in four years... No credit.
Pataki came back with the stale rejoinder that the President had predicted by signing the stimulus package that he would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent, failing to mention, as they always do, that at the time the President made the remark no one had yet realized the extent to which George W. Bush and the Republicans had wrecked the economy. This would not escape Matthews however:
MATTHEWS: Right. You know, this President came in inheriting an economic pooh (ph) storm. He elected -- he basically came in facing what could have been a second Depression.
PATAKI: Yes, he did.
MATTHEWS: OK. You know, he came in in February, basically, of last year. He came in -- the 20th of January, he got into office. He probably didn't even move into the office hardly until late January. It's now we're getting the April job reports of a year or so later.... You're giving him a whole lot of time here, aren't you, about a year, to turn around what is the worst case of any politician who's ever come into office. And then you say he hasn't been fast enough of cleaning up the crap pile that he inherited. I think you're being pretty tough on this guy.
PATAKI: Well, Chris, I...
MATTHEWS: I think your whole party blaming him from right to left -- I mean, Boehner says it was his fault that there's some kind of an oil spill, even though -- we're going to get into it in the show tonight -- the failure to regulate the pipeline industry, the failure to regulate offshore drilling with any kind of adequacy was not his fault.
PATAKI: Chris, what...
MATTHEWS: Was it?
PATAKI: Chris, what you're basically saying is that when you have a fundamental disagreement with the policies of this administration and feel that they have not helped to create jobs and get the economy growing, that somehow, it's unfair political criticism. I don't think so.
I know I’ll get flack for this, but so be it. This last statement by Pataki is interesting, for, as I have often said, it is not the criticism of this President that many object to, but it is the vilification and wildly unrealistic expectation that, with all that he is confronted with, he is expected to turn around this decades-old errant, and incredibly vast, ship of state just overnight. I once again give you Mr. Matthews:
MATTHEWS: Yes. Well, the other point of view, of course, Governor, is that for, well, a century we've waited for health care, ever since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, when he first promised it. And nobody did anything about the 30 million to 40 million people that kept growing who didn't get any health care in this country. And this President has tried to deliver it. Nobody else was trying to deliver it.
MATTHEWS(CONT.): Whatever you say about this President, he inherited all the trouble and the failure to act on that American agenda, which was health care. Now, how he did it is a subject of political debate. But it just seems to me I'm getting from the right here day after day after day, from Boehner, from the rest of them, from Eric Cantor, from all of them, Mike Pence, negative, negative, negative. It's like your side is rooting for him to fail.
PATAKI: No, Chris, you know, we're Americans, and we want our country to succeed. And the President, whether we agree with his policies or not, is our President...all of us, and we want him to succeed...but we think we can help him to succeed by criticizing his policies...
With all due respect Mr. Pataki, give me a frickin break! Mr. Matthews, on this day, I salute you!
Hardball broadcast:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...