While speaking to guests Chuck Todd of NBC and Howard Fineman of Newsweek, Matthews, during a segment specifically designed to belittle the intellectual capacity of the former vice presidential candidate, asked, "How can she be a pundit? She doesn`t know anything."
Comically, this was moments after the "Hardball" host practically dislocated his shoulder patting himself on the back saying, "This is what I like about politics, catching politicians not knowing what they`re talking about" (video embedded below the fold, h/t Politico via Hot Air):
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: This is what I like about politics, catching politicians not knowing what they`re talking about. Howard, you know this is my bread and butter.
Here is -- according to the authors of this new book...
HOWARD FINEMAN, NEWSWEEK: Yes.
MATTHEWS: And they`re incredibly credible authors, Heilemann and Halperin. Here is what they said.
"Palin" -- this is a quote -- "Palin couldn`t explain" -- this is getting ready for her big debate with Biden -- "couldn`t explain why North and South Korea were separate nations." She had no idea what the Korean War was, apparently, never heard of it. "She didn`t know what the Fed did, the Federal Reserve did, that it`s our central banking system. They asked who attacked on 9/11, and she suggested several times it was Saddam Hussein."
Is she the target of the misinformation campaign? And she was asked to identify the enemy that her son would be fighting in Iraq, and she drew a blank. Now, maybe that last one`s not so hard to explain. I mean, it is hard to know who the latest insurgents are.
FINEMAN: Right. Right.
MATTHEWS: But the fact is, not knowing the Korean War -- I understand she didn`t also really didn`t get quite the First and Second World War.
I mean, this is tabula rasa here.
FINEMAN: Well -- well, a couple things. Chris, first of all, what this book provides, and I have read most of it now, is a lot of novelistic detail on an overarching story that we already knew.
Those are devastating details. I`m assuming they`re true, because these guys worked hard on this thing. The level of ignorance is astounding. But the other thing that Steve Schmidt and others are doing, perhaps without fully realizing it, is that they`re further underscoring their own, I think, borderline irresponsibility in picking her.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
FINEMAN: I mean, even Dick Cheney said, in another passage in the book, this woman is not qualified. And yet they were willing to go ahead with the ticking time bomb that she was at that point.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
FINEMAN: Maybe she`s learned a lot since. Maybe she will learn a lot if she runs. Maybe she will learn a lot being a pundit on FOX News.
But at the time they picked her...
(CROSSTALK)
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: How can she be a pundit? She doesn`t know anything.
Let me go back. Let me go to Chuck.
FINEMAN: Yes. Well, you see, that`s my point. It was a dangerous thing to do.
MATTHEWS: And you`re -- you make it well. You make it well.
FINEMAN: Yes.
MATTHEWS: Chuck, what grabbed me was that great phrase by Steve Schmidt, and I know we all this business heard it before, when he says this put-away line: She doesn`t know anything.
It's going to be REALLY delicious when Fox programs Palin appears on have far higher ratings than all of the self-professed intellectually superior MSNBCers' such as Matthews, Maddow, and Olbermann.
Of course, it won't matter for they'll just keep calling her and her viewers dumb.
Ain't life grand?
