“Sen. Rand Paul versus Hillary Clinton in 2016 – there’s a tough one.”
Quote of the day: Chris Matthews
Hardball’s Chris Matthews on the end of the election
Chris Matthews is uber-smart and very passionate about politics.
This was his closing editorial from yesterday’s show.
Chris Matthews addresses GOP party playing the “race” card
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Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” ripped into GOP chair Reince Priebus over Mitt Romney’s “birther” joke last week and playing the “race” card in campaign ads.
Said Matthews: “It is an embarrassment to your party to play that card… This stuff about getting rid of the work requirement for welfare is dishonest — everyone’s pointed out it’s dishonest… And you are playing that little ethnic card there. You can play your games and giggle about it, but the fact is that your side is playing that card.”
Priebus wasn’t having it but Chris Matthews did not back down. Good for Matthews. Priebus and the GOP can sit back and deny, but what Chris Matthews says here is true. And the GOP knows it.
Chris Matthews plays ‘hardball’ with Tony Perkins
LGBT activists have been waiting for this day for a long time. Finally someone confronts Tony Perkins on his anti-gay rhetoric and doesn’t stand down.
Congressman Barney Frank and Chris Matthews do not let Tony Perkins “off the hook” here.
The only show I can honestly say I don’t miss is HARDBALL with Chris Matthews. I think he’s smart, fair and experienced. I like him and I like his clarity.
Loved seeing this happen. Tony Perkins throws out phrases like “the social science doesn’t conclusively show…”
Blah, blah, blah… it’s all his own lies because there are enough people in the world that IF they hear something enough, then they believe it must be true.
One point I have to make here: Perkins says over and over again that social science shows children do better with a mother and a father as opposed to two mothers or two fathers – and he’s wrong. At the Prop 8 trial, over and over experts testified that studies show children of lesbian or gay couples develop and achieve just as well as the children of heterosexual couples. Tony Perkins’ “social science” is made up of the lies he WANTS to believe.
Enough Mr. Perkins. Enough.
Hardball: Even in the Great Depression we built America
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As I’ve mentioned before, I watch Hardball on MSNBC every day. I think Chris Matthews is fair and clear. Especially in this argument.
Chris is always arguing for good construction and manufacturing jobs – the same kind of jobs that built America during the boom of the 1950s. And I agree. Jobs that need to be done for infrastructure anyway.
The 1950s were good days for America in terms of growth and opportunity. (By the way, the top income tax rate in the late 1950s was 91% versus 35% today. And America grew at an exponential rate in the 1950s and 1960s.)
Things that make you go “hmm…”
Hardball: Mitt Romney and his Etch-A-Sketch problem
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It seems like just when Mitt Romney gets a chance to take a breath and think he’s got it all down, he or his campaign makes some unforced error.
The Romney campaign’s Etch-A-Sketch gaffe may eclipse all of Mitt Romney’s other campaign missteps combined.
The real problem with this particular gaffe is the visual – of a toy everyone knows – makes it too easy to play into the scenario of Romney being a flip-flopper: the idea that he can just “shake it up” and start with a clean slate – which we all know is not the reality in politics today.
The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman and The Boston Globe’s Matt Viser weigh in on why the Etch-A-Sketch comment may outlive any other story about Romney in this election.
50 years ago today: John Glenn – first American in space
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From Chris Matthews on Hardball today:
When I was growing up, we got a lot of our science from television. There was “Mr. Wizard” who taught us chemistry, Werner von Braun – with a little help from Walt Disney – who taught us physics.
The main lesson was that we Americans were first in everything, that we are going to be the country to conquer space; that we were going to start the conquest by putting little things called satellites into orbit around the earth. Yes, that was how it was going to be.
And then came that terrible day in 1957 when we awoke to learn that the Soviets had done it; there was, indeed, a satellite, a really big one, winging its way around our world but it had been launched out there into space by the Communists, the people we thought – had been taught by Werner von Braun and Walt Disney – hardly in the game.
It made us sad. It made me sad, because it undermined us, made us think that the Communists were doing something we were trying to do but couldn’t. It had to do with booster rockets, with something called thrust. Their rockets were bigger, stronger, therefore better than ours.
For five years it went like this. They would send a man into space – Yuri Gagarin. They would send a man into orbit – Gherman Titov – and we would send one Vanguard rocket up after the other only to watch it topple right there in front of us, barely off the launching pad.
Then came the first American successes into space followed by this wondrous day fifty years ago today:
On February 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, circling the globe three times in Friendship 7. Glenn met with President Kennedy at the White House both before and after the flight.
Even space – especially space – isn’t free of politics, John Glenn well understood. He recalled to me that Kennedy knew “we were actually superior to the Soviets and that that’s what we were out to prove.” Glenn’s triumphant space flight proved the boost NASA needed. “I think one reason my flight got so much attention was that we sort of turned the corner in public opinion at that point.” In fact, conquering space offered an unprecedented thrill for the American people. Suddenly it seemed as if extraordinary things were possible.
And yes, there was a time in the lifetimes of so many watching right now that one of the extraordinary things today was quite ordinary: that we Americans could all root for one thing together. It was us against the Soviets for the leadership in space, leadership we knew in science, engineering, in possibilities. One of the great things about the early 1960s – besides the thin ties and fifty mile hikes – was the sense we Americans could do the things we set out to do – and could do them together.
As the voice of Mission Control said back then, “Godspeed, John Glenn.”
Chris Matthews: Newt ought to be ashamed of himself
Chris Matthews on Newt Gingrich’s assertion that President Obama has “put more Americans on food stamps than any other president.”
I agree with Chris that bringing up food stamps right now, and in this context, is political ‘code’ for Gingrich’s base. He knows he’s taking the back door to bringing up race issues, which most of us hope were long behind us.
Newt is making the racial charge here and putting the blame of poverty on the poor. “It’s their fault” is what he’s saying.
Sad statement that this plays in anywhere in America today.
Chris Matthews on President Obama protecting the country
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If the number one duty of an American president is to protect the country, Barack Obama is meeting his duty, calmly, resolutely, business-like.
Consider the way he has gone about it. He has accomplished the mission that took us into Iraq. Bin Laden is gone. He has removed the operational leader of al-Qaeda, Anwar al-Awlaki. He has persisted to its conclusion his decision to keep Moammar Gadhafi from slaughtering people. Gadhafi, who threatened to kill the people of Benghazi by the thousands, ended up hiding in a sewer pipe.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans, clearly the difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is that one knows how to hot-dog in the end zone, knows how to run up the Mission Accomplished banners, knows how to strut.
The other, Obama, makes a crisp statement in the Rose Garden and goes back to work. You decide which is most presidential. On that point, have you ever noticed how the least impressive dictators in the world wear the most impressive uniforms? I think of the South American Junta leaders flashing their epaulettes, the same Opera bouffe costuming the late Mr. Gadhafi favored. They love their military uniforms, love them to be as colorful as their weirdness would allow, love acting the part of military men when they’ve never been in a war, certainly not one they’ve won.
The lesson of today’s denouement in Libya is that the un-fancy, non-strutting leader is the one to put your money on in the long run.
It’s the clown, the show-off, the guy who loves to adorn himself in colorful uniforms and the foppery of fascism that you can safely predict will end his days as humiliated and scorned as a fellow named Benito Mussolini who ended his days hanging upside down.
(via Chris Matthews on HardballBlog)
Chris Matthews: Gov. Rick Perry and “appeasement”
I completely agree with Chris Matthews on this point.
Quoting Chris Matthews: “At this very moment of national challenge, with the president doing what every friend of Israel — left, right and center — understands he needed to do, this person from Texas, this foreign policy ingenue, spotted his chance and he showed up in New York to make his diplomatic debut.”
“Mr. Perry, you did our president a disservice, our country a dishonor today. You showed that you do not understand the role of the American presidency in our national life. When a president acts to defend the United States, in this case on principle as well as national interest, we should all stand behind him.”
“If you don`t get that, you don`t get us — much less the job of representing us on the world stage which the president did so well and so courageously today.”