From the Tweety files: He’s baaack
by digby
Those who’ve read my blog over the years know that I’ve been dogging Chris Matthews for years over his coverage of Iraq and the 2008 election. In the past few he moderated his approach a bit and became a little less obnoxious. Well, the old Tweety is back, and he’s loaded for bear.
Yesterday he spelled it out in the terms that make the most sense to him. After rending his garments over Ebola and suggesting that America start quizzing all travelers in the Israeli style just to make them sweat, he wondered if President Obama was up to the job:
Let’s get tough here. Is this the problem of a second term that presidents get lazy, intellectually lazy and cut off from the country, and they start picking deputies for jobs instead of looking for the best people? The lazy thing to do is, somebody leaves, you promote their deputy. This is, I think, a big part of the endemic problem of second terms. They don`t get out and mix with people, find new people, new hot shots to fill these jobs. They just keep promoting the person whose sort of turn it is, and they`re not as good as the person they picked the first time…
Realizing that he had evoked a racist stereotype, he corrected himself. And then went right ahead with a patented Matthews sexist comment:
I want to straighten out something I said to Roger before you get me accusing him, accusing this president of being physically lazy. I think there`s a social kind of laziness, the refusal to reach out and meet a lot of new people and check a lot of possibilities. Don`t just go with the next person in line. And I really think this second term cabinet is not up to the first term cabinet because they never are.
And you know that, Roger. They just never are. Kennedy went out and met people like McNamara and Rusk and people went looking for them, and he put them in the best slots he could. He talked them into it. He recruited people he didn`t even know, he recruited them. Presidents should go out and look for people. They should be practicing affirmative action all the time in leading, or else they get atrophied into that little world of people around him like Valerie and Mrs. Obama and people — you`re just listening to the same voices all the time. You`ve got to be Protean in the White House. And I know it`s a rigorous demand, but it`s a real one, or else you`re going to get smaller as your presidency goes on, and therefore more vulnerable to surprises.
Real men don’t listen to the “little world” of “Valerie” and “Mrs Obama,” especially when terrorists and deadly diseases are involved. (Maybe they could be consulted on the birth control mandate or something like that.) That’s obtuse enough. But nothing can equal the sheer daftness of Chris Matthews evoking the architects of the Vietnam war as great examples of presidential cabinet choices. Perhaps if President Obama is lucky, he too will find someone as good as the men who mired this nation into the worst foreign military quagmire it’s ever known.
That’s from my Salon piece this morning. You can read the rest here.