Roger Hedgecock, the former San Diego mayor turned conservative talk radio host, called MSNBC's Chris Matthews a liar to his face Friday evening.
This resulted in quite a heated exchange between the two on HBO's Real Time (video follows with transcript and commentary):
CHRIS MATTHEWS: The big lie is that the people who make a lot of money were the only ones who worked hard. You go to D.C. – I say this a million times, I’m going to keep saying it to the people out there with a little racial problem - I say, “Look, go to D.C. at 6:30 in the morning and drive around the tough neighborhoods. Everybody is waiting in line to go to the bus." You know where they’re going? They’re not going to get a welfare check. They're going to work. They’re going to work at 6:30 in the morning. It’s packed with people filling the buses going to work. And the idea that somehow the people that don't have a lot of money are lazy, where do you get that from? There’s a lot of people like your crowd that inherited everything. They were born sliding into home, and they take credit for it. You know that Romney gets away with this stuff all the time.
HEDGECOCK: Chris, Chris, calm down, man. You're just, you’re lying. I mean, come on.
MATTHEWS: It’s tonal.
HEDGECOCK: You guys and all this slander.
MATTHEWS: No, because I think there's a gentleman's agreement out there about covering up this racial game that your side has been playing this whole campaign about welfare…
HEDGECOCK: Oh, we're racist and we’re…
MATTHEWS: No, the advertising campaign is.
HEDGECOCK: You're just outrageously wrong, okay?
MATTHEWS: Why do you run the ads then? Why do you talk about welfare? Why does Newt talks about a food stamp president? Why do you keep going back to this old stuff again, this old dog-whistle stuff? Why do you keep doing it?
HEDGECOCK: The concern we have is just what Rana said. There has to be more social mobility. I come from a very poor background. I worked my way up and a lot of people have and were proud of it, and we don't want to see that taken away by government and handed out to programs that create more dependency, because food stamps are 72 percent more than when he took office.
Listen to Matthews’ pathetic response:
BILL MAHER: Wait, you said what a lot of Republicans say…
MATTHEWS: You know something? You don't like Obama.
HEDGECOCK: I don't like his policies.
MATTHEWS: No, you don’t like Obama.
HEDGECOCK: No, no, no, no, you're outrageously wrong.
MATTHEWS: Mitch McConnell was against him the first day he was in office.
HEDGECOCK: That’s wrong, it’s just wrong.
MATTHEWS: He said, “My number one goal is to get rid of this guy.”
Show your friends and neighbors what you think of the liberal media.
Buy a "Journalists for Obama" T-shirt to let them know where you stand!
Now watch something extraordinary as host Bill Maher - yeah, I said Bill Maher - plays the voice of reason:
MAHER: That's fake. You know what?
MATTHEWS: Fake? He's repeated it.
MAHER: I didn't want to get rid of Bush the first day?
MATTHEWS: Not from the first day, no matter what he did. No deals. No honeymoon. Nothing. Get rid of the bum.
MAHER: Yes because I knew he was a nincompoop from day one.
For a change, Maher was right - not about Bush being a nincompoop but with regard to the left's decision from day one to want to get the 43rd president out of office.
This is how politics works, and people like Matthews conveniently forget it the second a Democrat wins the White House.
As an aside, this exchange took place about ten minutes after Matthews falsely claimed "unemployment was well past ten percent" when Bush left office.
Talk about your delicious instant karma.
