Budding United States Senate candidate and still current MSNBC Hardball anchor Chris Matthews finds few things in life as thrilling as President-elect Barack Obama. Republican in-fighting, certainly, comes close.

As we saw on Tuesday, when Chris the Contender gleefully reported on another potential Senate challenge, of current Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski by her Governor, Sarah Palin. There was just so much wrong with this segment; it was a rich pageantry of ridiculous bias, rank hypocrisy and Matthews's snarkiness and adolescent boy sexual frustration.

I will let the video (located, with the audio, below the fold) speak for and to the entirety of the patheticness, and write further merely to point out some of the more ludicrous highlights.

(Audio is here.)

Let us begin with the opening graphic. Busts (I use this term for Chris's sake and benefit) of Gov. Palin and Sen. Murkowski side by side above the text "GOP ON GOP FIGHT!" A morphing, it would appear, of "GIRL ON GIRL FIGHT!" -- what an immature pubescent lad would yell at the top of his lungs were two of his female classmates to begin to go at one another (worded as such again for Chris's amusement), watching raptly and hoping breathlessly for one or the other's bodice to rip during the tussle.

The segment is entitled "BACK OFF SARAH!" (Like William F. Buckley, Jr., I loathe the use of exclamation points. This but forty-two second segment has graphics containing two), which Matthews delivers with impertinent joy.

The Contender then delivers what he thinks is the coup de grace, a quote from Sen. Murkowski that Matthews thinks again illustrates Gov. Palin's not-yet-ready-for-prime-time-ness, even into the distant future. The graphic he displays containing the quote has it bordered left and right by Bobble Heads of Palin and Murkowski. (As I said, this is in its entirety a way too cutesy segment.)

The only problem for The Contender is the quote that he thinks does in Gov. Palin is even more applicable to and more damning of the man who thrills him so, the current President-elect.

"If she (Palin) wants to be President, I don't think the way to the Presidency is a short stop in the United States Senate."

That The Contender goes to a story about his beloved President-elect Obama, who served but two years in the Senate before announcing his fateful run, immediately following his reading of Murkowski's quote is but delicious irony frosting on this half-baked cake.

—Seton Motley is Director of Communications for the Media Research Center and Contributing Editor for NewsBusters.org.