On his final Hardball before polls open for the 2014 midterm elections, MSNBC Chris Matthews groused about how an anti-Bruce Braley ad by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was "dangerous."
The former Jimmy Carter speechwriter made the complaint in a segment about popular Google searches in states with competitive Senate races. Matthews noted that "chicken dance" was the second most popular search term in Iowa related to the campaign, and that was because of a humorous Chamber of Commerce ad targeting Democratic Senate nominee Rep. Bruce Braley.
Matthews played the ad in its entirety and then huffed:
Shows you the power of advertising to get people curious. That's dangerous, if you think about it.
Ah, yes, it's "dangerous" when a campaign ad sticks in a voter's memory banks and provokes them to thought. That is, of course, if the ad is to the benefit of a conservative and to the detriment of a liberal Democrat.
Matthews, you may recall, has long been obsessed with Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst's ad in which she mentions how she castrated hogs on the farm where she grew up. Perhaps Matthews had that ad in the back of its mind as it helped catapult Ernst from obscurity in a crowded primary race and, on this first Monday in November, very well on the cusp of punching her ticket to the United States Senate.
Oddly enough, however, not once on his Monday edition of Hardball did Matthews snark about Ernst being the "pig castrater." This even as he denounced Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) as a modern-day Joe McCarthy and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) as a "science denier."
