If Obama wins on Tuesday night, Chris Matthews's mocking this morning of the notion that the polls are tightening will be soon forgotten.  But if McCain pulls off the upset, Matthews's smirking triumphalism will take its place in the halls of journalistic hubris near the famous photo of Harry Truman holding up the Dewey Defeats Truman front page.

Just before Matthews came on, Andrea Mitchell ended her set-up segment by mentioning that the McCain campaign had released internal polls showing the race tied in the battleground states.  When Meredith Vieira opened the Matthews interview by asking him to comment, the Hardball host went into full mock mode.

A beautiful woman, at once a scheming, ambitious right-wing ideologue, and the powerful, evil forces behind her, plot to seize the presidency from the man—foolish enough to have made her his running-mate—who may be concealing just how seriously sick he is, both physically and mentally!

As the stuff of straight-to-video filmmaking, not bad, perhaps.  But as the theory of an ostensibly serious column in America's newspaper of record?  And yet, that is the paranoid picture Frank Rich paints today in Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain.

Annotated excerpts:

[T]he 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race . . .  and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.

Watch in horror, as the scheming woman plots behind the muddled McCain's back!