For a guy who is forever hearing "dog whistles" and racially-tinged "code words" in conservative political rhetoric, Hardball host Chris Matthews seems blissfully unaware of the arguably anti-Semitic prattle he spewed tonight in his criticism of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress on March 3.
"I just wonder whether there's a new party being formed here: the Likud-Republican Party," Matthews lamented to his panel in a segment tagged "Invitation to Trouble":
The Likud is a party of the right. They believe in basically settling the West Bank. It has been their policy ever since the beginning with Begin, Menachem Begin. That's what they believe in. They don't want to give it up. They're going to hold on to it in some way. They put more settlements in there. I was over there with Vice President Biden a while back, right while we were there, a thousand new housing projects going up. So clearly he's not in agreement with our policies. I'm not sure he's for a two-state solution. I don't believe it at all. So why is the Republican Party siding with a guy who's not with U.S. policy, which goes way back, in a bipartisan way?
For the record, the consensus from all three liberal journalists on the panel -- Jackie Kucinich of the Daily Beast, Charles Ellison of the Philadelphia Tribune, and Perry Bacon of the Washington Post -- was that this invitation is pure partisan politics on the part of John Boehner and House Republicans eager to stick it to the president for the praise of the party base, and perhaps to make inroads to Jewish donors.
None of them allowed that maybe, just maybe, there are also deeply and honestly-held policy concerns Republicans have with the president's negotiations with Iran to lead them to extend an invite to the head of government for America's staunchest ally in the Middle East.
Also missing from the Hardball segment was any acknowledgement that Obama acolytes are hard at work in Israel assisting campaign efforts of Netanyahu's general-election opponents.
