Hillary Clinton is set to give her first television interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer on Monday night to promote her memoir Hard Choices, and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was visibly outraged that an ad would dare criticize her as she begins her book tour.
Appearing on his Hardball program on Monday, June 9, Matthews began his program by declaring that the ad was a “prime time attack” before complaining about the “disgusting event” where a “Right wing group has produced a television ad to air tonight during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first prime time book interview.” [See video below.]
The Hardball host continued to bemoan that the ad was set to air:
It's a particularly vicious ad charging the possible 2016 hopeful with joining in the slander of Israel. That's the word, slander. It attacks Hillary Clinton for not attacking her successor at the State Department, John Kerry, for using apartheid to describe the condition of the Jewish state when its Arab population exceeds its Jewish population estimated to be in the year 2020.
Matthews then wondered if the “attack ad” was "To punish Clinton for not being pro-Israeli enough, which seems a hard charge to make, given the past position she’s taken not just as Secretary of State but of course as United States Senator for New York.” Is it to intimidate her into taking a more hawkish position on the Middle East in the future? Or is it something to hurt her politically, to convince nervous supporters of Israel she’s not to be trusted as president?
Matthews continued his unabashed defense of Ms. Clinton and knocked the ad as “An indictment, as nasty as I’ve seen, usually the sort you see in the final days of a campaign paid for by a desperate side, the one seeing defeat in its face.”
The opening rant concluded with the MSNBCer fantasizing about the ad potentially sweeping Hillary into The White House in 2016:
It's also so unfair, so disgusting, that might just unite this country. Left, center and moderate against the hate-mongering crowd to put this thing on the air. Hillary is as pro-Israel as anyone in the country. To attack her on this front is to commit the very crime, slander, of which this villainous ad accuses her.
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC
Hardball With Chris Matthews
June 9, 2014
7:00 p.m. Eastern
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Prime time attack. Let's play "Hardball." Good evening. I'm Chris Matthews in Washington. Let me start tonight with what’s just happened, by which I mean truly disgusting event. A right wing group has produced a television ad to air tonight during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first prime time book interview. It's a particularly vicious ad charging the possible 2016 hopeful with joining in the slander of Israel. That's the word, slander. It attacks Hillary Clinton for not attacking her successor at the State Department, John Kerry, for using apartheid to describe the condition of the Jewish state when its Arab population exceeds its Jewish population, estimated to be in the year 2020. Kerry was saying that failure to establish a separate state for the Arab population would put Israel at that point into the terrible predicament of having to choose between being a democracy and a Jewish state. Anyway, the attack is timed for maximum publicity, but why? Is it to punish Clinton for not being pro-Israeli enough, which seems a hard charge to make, given the past position she’s taken not just as Secretary of State but of course as United States Senator for New York. Is it to intimidate her into taking a more hawkish position on the Middle East in the future? Or is it something to hurt her politically, to convince nervous supporters of Israel she’s not to be trusted as president? In any case, the ad’s an indictment, as nasty as I’ve seen, usually the sort you see in the final days of a campaign paid for by a desperate side, the one seeing defeat in its face. It's also so unfair, so disgusting, that might just unite this country. Left, center and moderate against the hate-mongering crowd to put this thing on the air. Hillary is as pro-Israel as anyone in the country. To attack her on this front is to commit the very crime, slander, of which this villainous ad accuses her.
