Remember all those demands for civility in politics after the tragic shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in January, 2011?
On Tuesday's Hardball, MSNBC's Chris Matthews said, "I’m with' [the Obama campaign] putting the knife in" Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for the supposed outsourcing that happened at companies Bain Capital invested in (video follows with transcript and commentary):
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Here's Joe Biden in Iowa today making the same points that are running in the pro-Obama ads about Bain. Let's watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Here's the bottom line, folks. Bain and their companies they made a great deal of money facilitating this outsourcing and offshoring American jobs. Yeah, they made a lot of money. But in the process, they devastated, they devastated whole American communities. You've got to give Mitt Romney credit. He's a job creator - in Singapore, China, India. He's been very good at creating jobs overseas.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CHUCK TODD, NBC: This is rough stuff and this is, look, Jerry (unintelligible) wrote a great column today and saying, you know, Mitt Romney’s path to victory, he has to win one of these sort of longtime Democratic blue states that have always been contested but Republicans have come up short. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. Take one of those three. And Iowa’s one of the other ones. And I tell you, this outsourcing stuff is…
MATTHEWS: Oh, it’s killer.
TODD: …it can be a killer against somebody.
MATTHEWS: I’m with them on putting the knife in on this one.
So, Matthews and Todd agreed that these outsourcing allegations are "killer."
And Matthews said, "I’m with them on putting the knife in on this one."
But this kind of talk was supposed to be eliminated in politics as a result of the Giffords shooting in January 2011.
Matthews even linked former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to that incident for the same absurd reasons most of the rest of the media did.
But now, seventeen months later, it's completely acceptable to talk about a campaign strategy as being "a killer" and supporting the president's team "putting the knife in [Romney] on this one."
The double standard is nothing less than sickening.
Maybe even worse, it came minutes after Matthews shamefully accused Republicans of trying to "kill off the older voters" in Pennsylvania with ID laws.
He's quite a journalist, isn't he?
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— Noel Sheppard (@NoelSheppard) June 9, 2012
