Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Is Chris Matthews taking lessons from Ed Schultz on keeping it classy?

In August and September, Schultz got off a series of fat jokes aimed at NJ Gov. Chris Christie.  After Schultz eventually stooped to calling Christie a "fat slob," he was reportedly reprimanded by MSNBC president Phil Griffin.

On this evening's Hardball, Matthews got off a fat joke of his own at Christie's expense.  Matthews suggested that someone inform Christie that the tunnel he vetoed is going to be "a wide tunnel; it'll be very useful to certain people."  The irony?  Matthews' gibe came in a segment about Daniel Patrick Moynihan in which Matthews made a point of praising the late senator from New York . . . for avoiding personal attacks. Video after the jump.

Time's Joe Klein took to his magazine's Swampland blog yesterday evening to defend former AEI scholar David Frum.

In doing so, Klein [pictured in file photo at right] contrasted Frum with "extreme" conservatives who were "pretty close to Jonestown" by "drinking their own kool-aid." Not only is the former Bush speechwriter a friend whose thinking he respects "even when we disagree," Klein argued that Frum is the Right's Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a genteel intellectual who bucked his party on some tenets of its orthodoxy but ultimately was vindicated by history:

I have some experience with a party intent on committing suicide. The Democrats were profoundly self-destructive when it came to race and crime in the 1970s and 1980s. They nearly excommunicated Daniel Patrick Moynihan--one of my mentors--because he told the truth about the impact of out-of-wedlock births on the black family. Over time, Moynihan's thesis was proved by sociology--and supported by prominent AFrican-American [sic] progressive scholars like William Julius Wilson--but he was never really welcomed back into the fold. And he didn't really care. Because he knew he was right.