MSNBC's Chris Matthews has failed to cover all three of the Planned Parenthood fetal-parts videos that have been released this month. But tonight the Hardball host found time for a segment on the latest development in Deflategate and devoted his closing "Let Me Finish" commentary to denouncing the Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe.
The Deflategate segment in question came halfway through the program and clocked in at 4 minutes and 42 seconds.
As to the lion killing controversy, not only did Matthews pontificate on the matter, he seems to have been sloppy with the facts, insisting that Minnesota dentist Walter James Palmer knowingly shot a "captured lion." For his part, Palmer insists that he was mislead by his guides, who coaxed the lion off of the premises of a national park adjacent to the hunting preserve on which he shot the lion with his bow.
Here's the relevant transcript:
MSNBC
Hardball
July 29, 20157:55 p.m. tease
CHRIS MATTHEWS, host: When we return, "Let Me Finish" tonight with this guy who went over to Africa to kill a captured lion. You're watching Hardball, the place for politics.
7:58 p.m. commentary
MATTHEWS: Let me finish with this guy who went over to Africa to kill a lion. I grew up enthralled by the notion of Africa and all its vivid wildness. I treasure the fact that we live on a planet that does include the wonders of elephants and lions and rhinos and all the rest just as I do in America, that has buffalo still roaming in our beautiful West.
Sadly, we also live in a world that includes a human being that gets kicks or whatever out of killing big animals., who believes he creates a picture of himself as some great hunter, even when his target is painstakingly delivered into the range of his bow.
This is about death, pure and simple. Just death. That's all. The head of the lion this guy had cut off so he could mount it as a symbol proves nothing except his ability to put a contract on a captive animal.
Slaughter is not a profile in courage, only a statement of human disgrace, stuffed now with the money this character poured into his pathetic ego.
If he wants to show off, if he wants his ego to bulge, he should leave the animals alone and go run for president or something. And while I'm on the subject, if you want to do something about this, send some money to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, IFAW it's called, and the people there care about saving our heritage of elephants and lions, not knocking them off so some guy can decorate his den with their heads.
Would that Matthews, a practicing Catholic, showed equal passion and compassion for the unborn and urged viewers to say donate to crisis-pregnancy centers.
