Hardball

Even Chris Matthews admits it. Talking to the liberal Alex Wagner on Wednesday's Hardball about the IRS scandal, the cable host came clean on the press and their love for Barack Obama. After Wagner insisted that the President was tired of an "unfair media," Matthews scoffed, "Let me tell you something. The press has generally been pro-Obama. That's a fact." If the President disagrees, "he's crazy." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The MSNBC anchor summed up the state of journalism: "I look at the major newspapers. I look at the major networks, broadcast nets. I look at us...CNN. Where's all this antipathy towards Obama?" According to Matthews, if the staff of the White House are unhappy with how they've been covered, they "are very uninformed about the history of presidencies."

Liberal journalists Chris Matthews and Jonathan Alter conducted a freak out session on Tuesday. Citing the growing IRS, Libya and Associated Press scandals, Matthews ranted that Barack Obama is a "ship with the engine off." Sending up the warnings, the Hardball anchor lamented, "[Obama is] vulnerable. And that is obvious to everyone this side of the White House gates."

In an unintentionally hilarious moment, former Newsweek journalist Jonathan Alter dismissed the support team the President has in the White House: "A lot of them are young. Some of them are very smart and talented. But they're all in awe of the president. They have an unhealthy love for him." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Obama staffers have an unhealthy love for the President? Keep in mind, Alter was talking to Chris "thrill going up my leg" Matthews. 

Liberal MSNBC host Chris Matthews on Monday expressed "outrage" over the growing IRS scandal involving targeted audits of conservative groups. At the same time, he fretted that such a controversy would strengthen conservatives who believe the federal government will soon take them to "concentration camps." Worrying about the President's political future, Matthews lectured Obama: "Find a way to get rid of whoever did this, or your enemies will ride this baby right through 2014."

The Hardball anchor sneered that the "right-wing people" "love this story" and "expect the worst." He continued, "They get up in the morning figuring, well, they're about to be picked up by the FEMA workers and taken to concentration camps or the black helicopters of new world order, they're coming to take their guns." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

As NewsBusters previously reported, MSNBC gave no live coverage to yesterday’s congressional hearings on the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi. Instead, the network aired a mere six minutes and 20 seconds of a highlight from the hearings. Those snippets were spread across four hours, and some of them were redundant.

Contrast that with the way MSNBC treated Hillary Clinton’s testimony on Benghazi back on January 23. On that occasion, the liberal cable network broadcast a whopping five hours and 28 minutes of live testimony.

We here at NewsBusters are often extremely critical of MSNBC’s Morning Joe as it often sets the agenda for the daily bias on the cable network. There are a few times, such as the Gosnell infanticide trial, when Morning Joe will actually prompt the rest of the liberal network to begin covering a story that it had previously ignored. Unfortunately that's not the case with Dick Harpootlian's racist attack on Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) at a fundraising dinner with Vice President Joe Biden in attendance.

You may recall that we noted that on May 6, Morning Joe ran a brief segment on the outgoing chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Dick Harpootlian grousing that the Palmetto State's governor, who, like fellow conservative Southern governor Bobby Jindal is of Indian ethnic heritage, should be sent, “back wherever the hell she came from and this country can move forward.” 

Apparently not even Chris Matthews listens to Chris Matthews. On Monday's Hardball, the liberal anchor compared the speeches at the National Rifle Association's 2013 convention to the Nazis. Three minutes later, he decried the use of Nazi comparisons. On the same program, Matthews insisted that the Republican Party has forgiven the assassination  of GOP President Abraham Lincoln.

As he played clips of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck at this past weekend's convention, Matthews railed, "First of all, it's Hitlerian, generally speaking, demagoguery. It's always about righteous indignation. All great demagogic speakers talk about how they're coming to get us." The host then played a clip of Beck showing a satirical poster of Michael Bloomberg as Vladimir Lenin. Mistaking this for Nazis, Matthews huffed, "But this idea of making moderate politicians like mike Bloomberg, who's really a centrist, into some sort of...what? A Nazi?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple spends a lot of time picking apart Fox broadcasts, but he was stunned by a Thomas Roberts interview on MSNBC with the new leader of NARAL Pro-Choice America, Ilyse Hogue. She claimed “we were the first out of the gate to call attention to this case.” Like a news butler, Roberts set her up to make that bizarre claim and then moved on to the next publicist's softball.

Wemple shot back: “Having done precisely 3,454 Nexis and Internet search on the Gosnell case, we missed the part where NARAL had led a charge to highlight the alleged atrocities in West Philadelphia.” He kept searching, and NARAL’s new boss kept looking sillier and sillier:

Chris Matthews won't let facts get in the way of his attacks on Republicans. On Wednesday's Hardball, he recapped the GOP Senate primary in Massachusetts to fill John Kerry's seat. Matthews inaccurately described Gabriel Gomez, a former Navy SEAL as "pro-gun, pro-assault rifle and pro-life."

In reality, Gomez's own website notes: "The President and the Congress must act now to forge consensus and compromise to close the gun show loophole, and to keep weapons out of the hands of those with mental health issues." The Boston Globe in March reported that Gomez sent a letter to the state's Democratic governor. On guns, he insisted, "I support the positions President Obama has taken on these issues and you can be assured I will keep my word and work on these issues as I have promised." Looks like Matthews should check his facts before launching into a rant.

The ongoing trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell has ignited the already contentious abortion debate across this country.  Dr. Gosnell is on trial for the murder of four babies and one woman at his abortion clinic, which people have called a “House of Horrors.”

Given the horrific nature of the crimes Gosnell is accused of committing, one would think MSNBC would discuss this horrific trial in any future discussion on abortion. Unfortunately, if you are Thomas Roberts, such a concept is foreign to you.

Following a speech by President Obama at the annual Planned Parenthood gala on April 26, Roberts decided to bring on three pro-abortion guests to trash Republicans, yet did not ask any of the guests about the Gosnell trial.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Can you imagine the firestorm that would happen if a conservative talker called President Obama an “SOB?”

On Wednesday’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The murder trial of abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell began on March 18.

On April 23, more than five weeks after it started, the folks at the so-called "news network" MSNBC decided it was time they reported it in primetime.

Hardball's Chris Matthews surprisingly ended the blackout Tuesday:

Last week, MSNBC's Chris Matthews was seen shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings wondering whether they had anything to do with "Tax Day" (which it wasn't in Massachusetts; it was Patriots' Day, a state holiday, and the tax filing deadline there was not until the next day) and asserting that "Normally domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right."

Now Matthews appears not to be interested in finding out what motivated the Tsarnaev brothers, accused of perpetrating the Boston Marathon bombings, to do what they allegedly did, as the following passage from an April 22 "Hardball" discussion with an incredulous FBI profiler found at RealClearPolitics tells us (bolds are mine):

As NewsBusters reported earlier, MSNBC's Chris Matthews seems hell-bent on trying to blame the Boston Marathon bombing on a domestic terrorist, preferrably a conservative one.

After saying shortly into his Hardball program, "Normally domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right," Matthews later asked his guests if Tax Day had something to do with the event since it doesn't mean a "whole lot to the Arab world or Islamic world or the, certainly not to al Qaeda" (video follows with transcript):

Just hours after explosions rocked the Boston Marathon on Monday, Chris Matthews speculated, "Normally domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right." He then reconsidered and suggested, "...That’s not a good category, just extremists, let’s call them that." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

During live coverage, the Hardball host highlighted a possible explosion at John F. Kennedy's presidential library and thought this could be a personal attack on the Democratic Party: "...But going after the Kennedy Library, not something at Bunker Hill, not something from the Freedom Trail or anything that kind of historic, but a modern political figure of the Democratic Party. Does that tell you something?" (Police are now considering the incident at the JFK library to be fire-related.) One can only guess what it tells Chris.

Hardball's Chris Matthews on Thursday again smeared pro-Second Amendment Senators, this time comparing them to "Jim Crow" racists. While talking about GOP politicians who threatened to filibuster the current gun control bill, Matthews spewed, "But you remember when they fought in the early '60s about, about Jim Crow and getting rid of all those racial things down south where it says white only at the gas station, men's room and everything?"

Talking to journalist Chuck Todd, Matthews continued, "And that was the old states of the confederacy were against any of those changes. But now is there that large a body of Republicans out there that are truly being represented by the don't-even-vote crowd?" Apparently, Matthews has again forgotten that it was the Democratic Party that represented the segregationist south. [UPDATED with video below. MP3 audio here.]

Chris Matthews and former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele got into a heated debate Tuesday over the Hardball host painting the GOP with "one brush."

At the end of the segment, Steele said, "You're not having a broad-based discussion any longer. You're becoming a cartoon of the cartoon" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Al Sharpton on Monday said one of the funniest things uttered on MSNBC this year.

Talking with Chris Matthews immediately after President Obama's speech in Hartford, Connecticut, Sharpton said - with a straight face no less! - "We’re not engaging in Americans hating each other" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Clueless Chris Matthews stepped into it this week when he expressed shock that women actually fear domestic violence. After watching the clip on the "Media Mash" segment on Fox News Channel's April 3 edition of Hannity, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell observed "It is a head scratcher because he spent all of last year and all of 2011 telling us that there was a war on women." [video embedded below the page break]

"He doesn't understand that there are -- in 2010, there were 765,000 cases documented of attacks on women. So suddenly he's oblivious to that," the Media Research Center founder observed. Host Sean Hannity also addressed the latest incident where Chris Matthews tried to tar conservatives with murderous violence, this time the slayings of prosecutors in Texas that may be connected to the Aryan Brotherhood. Responding to that video, Bozell observed:

MSNBC's Chris Matthews had quite a heated debate Thursday with Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America.

At the end of a highly-contentious Hardball segment, Pratt told his host that he's against all background checks "because we don't trust people like you" (video follows with transcript):

When I saw the recently released PPP poll concerning America's belief in "conspiracy theories," I knew someone in the media would cherry-pick it to trash conservatives.

Living down to my lowest expectations was MSNBC's Chris Matthews who on Wednesday's Hardball chose to use the poll to attack Republicans as well as "the peanut gallery for Glenn Beck and company" without ever mentioning any Democrat responses (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is not known for his eloquent choice of words.  Wednesday, April 3 proved to be no different than any other day as the liberal Hardball host as he asked, during a discussion on Hillary Clinton’s political future, if domestic violence is “something women really worry about."

The facepalm moment occurred during segment with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell and Howard Feinman of The Huffington Post. Matthews gleefully admired Hillary Clinton’s appearance at the Vital Voices awards ceremony. Mitchell, who herself attended the ceremony with Clinton, provided another glowing portrayal of Hillary, commenting that:

An unhinged Chris Matthews exploited another tragedy on Wednesday, connecting the pro-Second Amendment views of Ted Cruz and other Republicans to the shootings of two prosecutors in Texas. The Hardball anchor began by dredging up failed Senate candidate Sharron Angle's three-year-old reference to "Second Amendment remedies." Matthews connected, "If that was frightening enough for you, how about what's happening in Colorado and Texas?...In Texas, two prosecutors were killed, a third has now pulled out of a case against the Aryan brotherhood of Texas for, quote, 'security reasons.'"

Matthews made his linkage totally clear: "We've got a Texas senator, Ted Cruz, who won't let the Senate hold a democratic vote on gun safety. So, no democracy. We've got people out there using guns to get even with public officials, intimidating those they don't kill." Skipping from Angle, to the murder of prosecutors, to Ted Cruz, he snarled, "This is where we are with guns in this country. Second Amendment remedies being executed on public officials. Refusal by some elected officials to let us have a democratic vote on what to do about it." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday actually said, “Racism is the belief that one race - whites - should rule all others.”

Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain responded to this nonsense on Fox News's Hannity Tuesday stating, "It's laughable what Chris Matthews is saying...Maybe he doesn't have enough black friends who's telling him the truth" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Hopefully, everyone has by now figured out that yesterday’s Notable Quotables posting was an April Fools spoof, an annual tradition here at the Media Research Center, where our staff makes up quotes in an effort to parody the everyday outrageousness of liberal journalists.

This year’s twist: While all of the quotes were attributed to MSNBC host Chris Matthews, his over-the-top rhetoric is nearly impossible to parody, so eight of the 21 published quotes in the full edition were real (as were five of the 14 in the truncated version posted here at NB). The challenge for readers was to separate the real ones from the fake ones.

After the jump, you’ll find the same text as in yesterday’s post, this time with correct attributions and links to the corresponding MRC-TV video clip for each of the genuine quotes:

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews seems to think that only white people can be racist.

On Monday’s Hardball, he actually said, “Racism is the belief that one race - whites - should rule all others” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Does Chris Matthews have a new Democrat to give him a "thrill" up his leg? On Monday, the Hardball anchor praised Hillary Clinton's stature leading up to a hypothetical 2016 run as the most impressive since General Eisenhower in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, oversaw D-Day and defeated the world-wide threat of the Nazis.  Clinton, on the other hand, has been a politician and the Secretary of State during the disaster in Benghazi.

The 67-year-old Matthews reminisced about seeing a newsreel of Eisenhower at a movie theater. His dad informed him that Ike would be president at some point. The MSNBC host compared, "Well, nobody outside of incumbent presidents, and not even some of them, has in all the years since enjoyed such a commanding position going into a presidential cycle as Hillary Clinton." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

[April 2 update post: See which quotes were real and which were fake]

The latest edition of MRC's Notable Quotables newsletter (PDF) has just been posted over at MRC.org, a special "Matthews Mega-Meltdown Edition." In this issue: our favorite MSNBC host drools over the “perfect” Barack Obama, hailing the “amazing economy” Obama has delivered to America and lobbying for the new Pope Francis to bring an Obama-esque “hope and change” regime to the Catholic Church.

At the same time, Chris decries the “racism” of opposing anything Obama proposes; wonders if Republicans will switch to “sexism” if Hillary Clinton becomes the top Democrat in 2016; and sees an anti-Michele Bachmann message in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Witch of Coos.” Oh, and Chris insists: “Hardball is absolutely non-partisan.” You can read highlights after the jump; the whole package of 21 outrageous quotes is at www.MRC.org.

[UPDATED: See below.] Chris Matthews on Thursday took a break from comparing conservatives to Nazis and instead compared them to movie Nazis. The Hardball anchor opened the program by referencing the classic movie Casablanca. In this example, Barack Obama is the good guy and the Second Amendment supporters are the Nazis.

Matthews spewed, "You know that scene in Casablanca when the French police captain shoots the Nazi, Major Strasser, and Humphrey Bogart does the right thing by Ingrid Bergman, and the anti-Nazi hero Victor Laszlo says 'Welcome back to the fight, Rick'?" In case anyone was unclear on the comparison, the liberal journalist added, "Well, I felt that way today watching President Obama get back to the front in the historic battle for gun safety." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]