Chris Matthews Tries On His Driftglass Hat

Republican Grand Ayatollah Jefferson Davis is delighted with the progress of his Party.

Tweety signed off his show tonight thus:

...
But doesn't the Republican National Committee NC have duties beyond raising money and showing up on the Sunday talk shows?

Doesn't it have a responsibility -- a moral responsibility -- to tell the parties across the country that the Party of Lincoln shouldn't become the Party of Jefferson Davis.

Well alrighty then and good for you.

And just for the record and not to put too fine a point on it, this is me, writing in...

... January 2006:

Or to paraphrase Lincoln – who your Party used to esteem highly, once upon a time, before you sold your Founder out the heirs of Jefferson Davis...

... January 2006:

... the heirs of Jefferson Davis and all the rest of Conservative Children of the Corn are now no longer simply and recklessly pandered to. These hucksters and bigots and pinheads have taken over the Republican Party, wholly and outright, and one important pillar of their takeover of the Party – and the country – has been the creation of a vast, malignant propaganda machine to feed back to them the lies they want to hear.

... March 2006:

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And if we choose the latter – if we refuse to cope or adapt, but just insist that the government keep us stocked with cheap goods and cheap labor by any means necessary – all of Tom Friedman’s schools will not save us. 

Because by that time the Slave Markets will have once again become permanent fixtures on our national landscape, and the Jefferson Davis South will have well and truly risen again.

... April 2006:

So as the Party of Lincoln has morphed into the Party of Jefferson Davis, the Battle of Selma is now being stage-managed by the fusspot ghost of George Brinton McClellan.

... May 2006:

No, BoBo. It is YOU who don’t have the numbers to govern. You are riding shotgun in Jerry Falwell’s Clown Car, not the other way around. You are the one who has made a career of telling people not to mind the madmen in the basement of the GOP, as they ripped the walls out, burned the deeds and carefully mutated the Party of Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis.

... November 2006:

The Klan is, in a very real sense, the main reason why there even is a Republican Party that looks and acts and governs the way it does today. 

Why it has mutated and degenerated from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Jefferson Davis.

... January 2008:

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Sunday was redolent with the poorly perfumed remains of St. Ronnie, especially as channeled though the medium of Jesus Spirit Lady Peggy Noonan ,who deployed a most genteel form of parlor-speak to describe the ugly reality of what really happened during his reign as the Acting President.

How Reagan used a combination of timing, acting ability and language carefully laced with racist and classist code to create an ice-bridge that permitted the Children of Jefferson Davis to join the Party of Lincoln.

I could go on and on.  And on.  And on.  But that would be rude of me.

Of course, back in the day when Liberals like me were being widely and brutally pilloried for posting these sorts of things on the blogs, Chris Matthews was busy treating Liberals like hippie pinko nut cases away from which he could not backpedal fast enough:

MATTHEWS: I make this president look like -- you don't watch this program, Alexandra. That has never been the case with me. And anybody watching knows right now, we treat this guy [Bush] with respect. I happen to like him. I voted for him at least once. I'm not going to go any further on that. But the idea that we treat him like a dunce is just inaccurate.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Just to straighten the record out, Alexandra, back in the 2000 race, I was one of the few journalists that pointed out that George W. Bush did extremely well in those debates against Al Gore. In fact, I said he won in terms of personality, in terms of likability and fairness and on other grounds. I was the one who took a lot of heat for taking that position.

From the beginning, I've defended him on issues like saying Jesus Christ is his personal philosopher. I've defended him against the liberal elitists who did put him down. So, I don't think it's fair to say that I have in any way abused him. Do you want to take that back or do you want to start over or what here?

Back in the days when Matthews helped engineer the firing of Phil Donahue for fear that Donahue might get some of his Liberal stank on Matthews and mess up his purdy MSNBC career (from HuffPo):

...

Donahue was a rare anti-war voice on television during the run-up to the war, but he was fired in early 2003, even though his show was a highly rated one on the network. A leaked memo later revealed that NBC executives considered him a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war."

As it turned out, one of the people reportedly pushing for Donahue to leave was Chris Matthews.

New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman wrote about Matthews' dealings with Donahue in a 2010 article:

Donahue’s problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former G.E. CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright (the two summered together on Nantucket). Matthews saw himself as MSNBC’s biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue’s show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

"I think he saw me as a threat to his supremacy," Donahue told HuffPost Live's Marc Lamont Hill. "He wanted to be the face of MSNBC and here comes this talk show host. I had the benefit of recognition ... I think I was a threat to his goal of being the man at MSNBC. He was quite emotional. He was emotionally upset."

He said that he had not been prepared for "the fear of the suits at MSNBC" about his show, adding that he was forced to put two conservative guests on for every liberal.

You might not remember us, Chris.
But we definitely remember you.