Chris Matthews, Hack, and the Return of Republican Swift Boat Operations

Same crap, different week. Yesterday brought us the sight of Drudge heavily pushing the feces-laden smear that Democrats were aligning against Alito because he was an Italian American. We then got to see MSNBC's Chris Matthews pick up the smear and run with it, waving a "discovered" Democratic memo that he wouldn't bother to actually show anyone but which, we were assured, contained a "disgusting" attack on Alito's ethnicity.

Only one problem. As it turns out, the whole thing was a crude Swift Boat style attack on Democrats that was apparently orchestrated by reliable Republican A. Kenneth Ciongoli, crassly distributing his bigotry-baiting claim under the auspices of the National Italian American Foundation. Oh, and he's hardly a disinterested party -- his son, as it turns out, clerked for Alito.

So within the span of half a day, an attack was manufactured, distributed to reliable Republican sources, and placed on MSNBC, which treated it as something they had themselves "discovered". And within that same half a day, it was tracked back from MSNBC to its original Republican source.

The name "Scalito"? Hardly an "attack" on Italian Americans like myself -- it's a nickname that has been used by legal observers, friend and foe alike, to describe Alito's distinctly Scalia-like, far right judicial philosophies. And those legal observers have been using it for, at bare minimum, the last two years.

And, as it turned out, the "disgusting" memo smearing Alito as Italian American didn't contain any such attack -- the attack was completely fabricated, by a Republican pushing the smear to Drudge, where it was picked up by every newsman in Washington fool enough to use Drudge as a source. By which to say, Chris Matthews.

Drudge has long been a reliable outlet for Republican attack politics, in that he'll apparently print anything a Republican gives him, no matter how transparently fraudulent. But it's relevant to observe just how easily the bizarre "Democrats hate Italian Americans" smear moved from the usual Republican sources, was fed to Drudge, and then came out the other end of the beast to be spread all over town.

This is the Republican "political genius", in its entirety. Make up a lie. Use Republican-backed outlets to distribute the lie. And hope like hell that the lie sucks all the air out of the actual American debate. It's the very cornerstone that the Fox News studios have been built on. Swift Boats aren't just for Vietnam -- they're the major mode of transportation for Republican lies and talking points all over this country.

Chris Matthews' conveniently mustered and timed "outrage" on this smear -- which he did not source to anyone but his own fevered brain -- was a perfect demonstration of the pundit hackery that feeds on these Republican talking points. He was more than willing to be used as a conduit for the Drudge-produced Republican smear. Chris is, among other things, a seasoned political observer. He knows how these things work, but yet he's willing to play the part of the insincere hack and pretend otherwise.

Yeah, Chris. We're all buying it. Chris Matthews, (presumed) seasoned political observer, just discovered that talking points exist, and he's disturbed by the very crassness of the notion. So disturbed that he has to make up fabrications about what they say.

Now, we're talking about a man who just spent much of the last two weeks, for example, opining that outing a man's undercover CIA wife, causing death threats and unknown damage to national security, was "standard" operating procedure for retaliating against a political foe in Washington.

This is a man who called up Joseph Wilson personally, according to Wilson, to tell him that Karl Rove had told him Wilson's wife was now "fair game".

And yet we're supposed to believe for even a second that Chris Matthews is shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- that there might be a memo produced somewhere in the bowels of Washington with fifteen talking points about far-right Judge Samuel Alito?

Chris Matthews: you can sop your remaining credibility up off the floor, it just dribbled out of every orifice you've got. Oh, I'm sure that you were outraged. Really, deeply outraged, just like Drudge and the other Republican sources who just coincidentally were drilling the exact same counter-talking points throughout the day. Mmm-hmm.

But you know what? Let's for the moment give Matthews the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he wasn't told what to say about the supposedly-"disgusting" memo from those that gave it to him to wave around his studio. Could Matthews really come up with the "it's an Italian American slam" on his own?

Turns out, he could. As commenter joejoejoe discovered, this isn't the first time that Chris Matthews opined on Italian American bigotries. From a previous Hardball transcript with Andrea Mitchell, it seems that both Matthews and Mitchell play both sides of the bigotry fence, in an exchange on whether or not alleged corruption and voter bribery would throw a senate seat to the "I think Rick is Italian-American" candidate:

Can I ask you both, is this election now, eight days off, about who wins what state?  Or is it really about that water line that goes up for Kerry and keeps going up or not?  Is it really about the national vote that will is going to dictate the results in five or six or 10 of these states?  Or is it each state have to be fought on its own?

MITCHELL:  I think it is ground wars in nine states.  And we are seeing...

C. MATTHEWS:  Street money, in other words.

MITCHELL:  It is street money.  It is voting...

(CROSSTALK)

C. MATTHEWS:  There's going to a lot expended out here in these streets in the next week, you can bet.

(CROSSTALK)

MITCHELL:  You saw that the new registrations number were higher than the number of people who even lived here.

C. MATTHEWS:  Philly is going to have the highest paid voters in American history this year, from what I hear.

FINEMAN:  It's good for the local economy.  Bush is going to be--the president is going to been here three times between now and Election Day, including, I think, Sunday or Monday in Western Pennsylvania, where they're counting on the Santorum conservative cultural vote to somehow bring Bush through in Pennsylvania.

(CROSSTALK)

MITCHELL:  We call it walking-around money here on Election Day in Philadelphia.  Watch it.

C. MATTHEWS:  OK.

I think Rick is Italian-American.  He's a Philadelphia, a Pennsylvanian.  I think a lot of that stuff explains why he wins, not that he is a right-winger or anything like that.

C. MATTHEWS:  Or that's what I would say, anyway.

Nice, and go to hell, Chris. It seems Matthews has the nose of a hound, when it comes to sniffing out jackass bigoted statements. He's had his own furry hound butt to practice on.

See how that works, Chris? Pretty easy to do, huh? Think you might want to have pondered what you were getting into, when someone gave you that memo?

I want to say two other things here. First, an aside... to the various people debating whether or not an attack on Italian Americans is "racist" or merely "bigoted", it sort of depends on who you ask. Obviously, Italian is not a "race". But historically, yes, the bigotries were racially motivated. For a long time in this country, Italian Americans were considered "dark blood", along with other southern Europeans. And sadly, the last remnants of the jackasses opining on such things have not yet been planted in the ground and danced upon.

So yes, even though you'd have to be pretty dim to consider, for example, every group that spoke a distinct language to be their own "race", even that was the way it was, for many folks who considered non-white to be anyone that you couldn't read a newspaper through in strong sunlight. And no -- even today, that's not gone.

So you can use whatever word you want to describe it, I think it's a rather silly debate, personally. Whatever you call it, you can count on the party of the Southern Strategy to exploit it, obfuscate it, and twist it into a new newspeak meaning worthy of Orwell.

And here's the other thing I want to say, flat-out, to the sorry excuses for Americans that occasionally wander by these posts from the far-right side of the blogosphere, when they're not busy collecting examples of any Muslim Doing Something Devious in the news anywhere in the world, or linking to the various stories of the mountains of weapons of mass destruction that they find every day, from the comfort of their desks, and yet for some reason the actual troops in Iraq, and the entirety of the United States intelligence apparatus, have confirmed weren't actually there.

During the last four years, we've heard the reports of American troops sodomizing civilian captives by breaking chemical lights in their rectums -- done in our name. We've seen still photos of young children covered in red, with chunks of what used to be their father's head scattered around the pavement -- done in our name. We've heard casualty estimates on the Iraqi side, in their supposed fight to be free of weapons of mass destruction, that center on 100,000 deaths, and are in almost no possible circumstances less than 40,000 -- about half of them women and children. We've read the emails from FEMA personnel frantically begging for help in the Superdome, while Washington officials go out for a bite to eat and the president praises his efforts and the suburbian police meet the black folk at the bridge to make sure they're damn well not going to find anything to eat in their county. We've seen one of the far-right poster children -- the most prominent Foaming Jackass Conservative Not Named Ann Coulter -- publish a book defending the notion of putting entire American families in detention camps rather than let that particular race run free in the country.

If you're fine with all of that, and you still get the tittering vapors at seeing the word fuck in a moment of much, much deserved fury, then I'm not exactly sure what to tell you. You and I have an entirely different notion of what deserves moral outrage. Guess how much I care about yours?

Given the horrors of the last five years, if the worst thing I have to worry about is my daughter seeing the word fuck -- but not the pictures of torn limbs, slit throats, caved-in heads, naked prisoners with dogs attacking them, and the charming fixtures of the far right appearing on our radios and televisions daily to tell us why all of these things are good and decent American values and we and our children should be grateful for them -- I would have settled for that trade. So thank you, dear Republican readers. But for a fake smear campaign dreamed up by GOP hacks and to use my family, my religion as talking points, you don't deserve better words than what I've given you.