If once is an MSNBC aberration, is twice is a trend? Earlier today we reported on Ed Schultz getting surprisingly angry over the Obama administration's weakness in confronting ISIS, calling the situation a "religious war."
Just two hours later, Chris Matthews sounded a similar alarm, saying "if I were ISIS I wouldn't be afraid . . . the American people are getting humiliated . . . it sounds like we can't stop it." Have we reached a watershed moment among normally dutiful MSM supporters of President Obama?
Matthews was interviewing State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. Although not as feckless as the pitiful Jen Psaki, Harf actually broke out the "root causes" solution to terrorism, eliciting yet more scorn from Matthews.
Were the mass beheadings of Christians a turning point even for the MSM? If Rachel Maddow piles on . . .
CHRIS MATTHEWS: What do we do as Americans when we look at 21 Christians beheaded for the purposes of humiliating us, the Christian world, the Western world? It's aimed at us, those pictures . . Well, how do we win? How do we stop this? I don't see it. I see the militias, the Shia militias coming out of Baghdad; they're all Shia. The Sunnis hate them. The Sunnis are loyal to ISIS rather than going in with the Shia. You've got the Kurds, the Jordian air force and now the Egyptian air force, but I don't see -- if I were ISIS, I wouldn't be afraid right now. I would figure there's no existential threat to these people. They can keep finding places where they can hold executions and putting the camera work together, getting their props ready and killing people for show and nothing we do right now seems to be directed at stopping this.
MARIE HARF: We cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the longer term--we need the longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups. Whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs --
MATTHEWS: We're not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime. Or 50 lifetimes. There's always going to be poor people; there's always going to be poor Muslims, and as long as there's poor Muslims the trumpet's blowing and they'll join. We can't stop that, can we? . . . This sounds like we're going to get rid of juvenile delinquency in America over time by erasing poverty and improving education. Sure, over time. But the American people I think are getting humiliated morally by this. We are seeing these pictures, and what are you supposed to say: I'm going to think about something else? What are the American people supposed to do about this, right now? They're watching right now. What do they supposed tp do to stop these indecent killing of people? This burning alive of that good pilot, the whatever they did to the American woman over there, whatever they did, whatever they're doing to these people, beheading them, beheading them. What are we doing to stop this? It sounds like we can't stop it.
