Chris Matthews can blow himself....
I have had a teeter-totter opinion of Chris Matthews for some time, sometimes watching him and agreeing with him (like when he had Jack Murtha on), and sometimes disagreeing with him. But this has really changed my mind about this neanderthal. I thought It was bad that Kate O'Bierne was always on but to actually say that McCarthy was right(?) is just plain bananas.
Attytood has it right saying:
You know what Matthews' analogy is like? It's like saying that because there are some real terrorists, that invading Iraq wasn't really so bad. Oh wait, that's pretty much what Matthews' fellow and the other pundicrats have said, isn't it? (NOTE: Updated in fairness to some critical Iraq comments he made in 2003). In fact, Matthews might as well have said this:
"And the biggest nonsense of this sort of revisionist history is that there wasn’t a terrorist threat and that Bush was just an ex-drunken fool. Well, he may have been a former drunk – he certainly was – and he may have been unable to shoot straight, but there were lots of targets there. He just didn’t hit any.
I mean, how did we get to the point where saying that a communist witch hunt (which didn't even find any "witches") is acceptable now?
Now this is the part that makes me furious. In today's society we need now, more than ever, common sense approaches to this problem, not the knee-jerk reaction to radical Islam that has been playing out in the last 6 years. There is no way that this threat is any more necessary to curtail our freedoms than the Cold War was, and we made it through that without sacrificing liberty for security. I, and many others, would rather have our individual freedoms protected and have a risk of attack than to give all that up to a neo-fascist state-run militaristic dictatorship, which seems to be happening. The lying about Katrina efforts or lack thereof, the NSA warrantless spying, the leadup to the Iraq war; all these things reek with the stench of fear-mongering that has pervaded this administration. When people hear our president speak about a "mushroom cloud", it creates a very typical kind of response in people. The reacton creates a morphogenic (and illogical as evidence shows) spread of fear response in the populous. This is exacerbated by the media picking up the "story" and creating a facade that this is the most threatened we've ever been, and that is empirically false.
I have no problem with facing threats and fighting when a severe risk to our culture arises, but when we start curtailing and changing our culture and the freedoms we enjoy in that culture, we have an even more serious threat than those who would threaten us externally. For if the threat comes from the foundation of our government, that is the greatest risk we face. And if our citizens are crippled with fear, that threat becomes ever the more deadly to our civilisation.
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post about the fourth estate and how it fits into the NSA wiretapping scandal.
Check it out.
Attytood has it right saying:
You know what Matthews' analogy is like? It's like saying that because there are some real terrorists, that invading Iraq wasn't really so bad. Oh wait, that's pretty much what Matthews' fellow and the other pundicrats have said, isn't it? (NOTE: Updated in fairness to some critical Iraq comments he made in 2003). In fact, Matthews might as well have said this:
"And the biggest nonsense of this sort of revisionist history is that there wasn’t a terrorist threat and that Bush was just an ex-drunken fool. Well, he may have been a former drunk – he certainly was – and he may have been unable to shoot straight, but there were lots of targets there. He just didn’t hit any.
I mean, how did we get to the point where saying that a communist witch hunt (which didn't even find any "witches") is acceptable now?
Now this is the part that makes me furious. In today's society we need now, more than ever, common sense approaches to this problem, not the knee-jerk reaction to radical Islam that has been playing out in the last 6 years. There is no way that this threat is any more necessary to curtail our freedoms than the Cold War was, and we made it through that without sacrificing liberty for security. I, and many others, would rather have our individual freedoms protected and have a risk of attack than to give all that up to a neo-fascist state-run militaristic dictatorship, which seems to be happening. The lying about Katrina efforts or lack thereof, the NSA warrantless spying, the leadup to the Iraq war; all these things reek with the stench of fear-mongering that has pervaded this administration. When people hear our president speak about a "mushroom cloud", it creates a very typical kind of response in people. The reacton creates a morphogenic (and illogical as evidence shows) spread of fear response in the populous. This is exacerbated by the media picking up the "story" and creating a facade that this is the most threatened we've ever been, and that is empirically false.
I have no problem with facing threats and fighting when a severe risk to our culture arises, but when we start curtailing and changing our culture and the freedoms we enjoy in that culture, we have an even more serious threat than those who would threaten us externally. For if the threat comes from the foundation of our government, that is the greatest risk we face. And if our citizens are crippled with fear, that threat becomes ever the more deadly to our civilisation.
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post about the fourth estate and how it fits into the NSA wiretapping scandal.
Check it out.
posted by Diatomesque at 4:47 AM
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