Matthews: Left-wing Bloggers Haven't Convinced Public of Wonders of 'Social State'

Wondering how much faith the left has in your ability to run your own life? Chris Matthews was brutally honest today when he criticized that "idealistic notion" of self-reliance that ignorant conservatives insist on pushing.

Matthews apparently believes that without massive social welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security, there would be "poor people all over the place, old people lying in the streets," and the nation would look like "Calcutta."

He made these absurd claims -- and they are absurd -- on yesterday's Hardball, and went on to call for a more robust "social state," complaining that lefty bloggers had not done enough to make it seem more desirable to the American people (h/t Gateway Pundit).

Steve, that's part of the propaganda problem here. The problem is we don't think of what the country would be like if we didn't have medicare for our parents as they get very old, in their 80s for example, and they're still alive. They need health care, a lot of it, and have don't have any source of income. They're not working every morning. They're not making a paycheck.

We don't think -- What would it be like in this country, Calcutta? Poor people all over the place, old people lying in the streets. I mean we don't think about what it would be if we didn't have health care, if we didn't have Social Security for people at the age of 65. If we didn't have unemployment compensation. If we didn't have a progressive income tax.

There's a lot of things we don't think about and the right wing just pounds and pounds away at this idealistic notion of a cowboy country, where everybody's self-reliant. Well, part of self reliance is -- …

I think progressives for all their power in the blogosphere have not done a positive case for the advantages of some kind of social state.