Chris Matthews, the grand old man of Democratic political punditry, has been vanquished by the terrible swift sword of political correctness, the scourge of liberals. He announced his retirement from his MSNBC show on Monday night in a three-minute farewell, and then walked off the set.
The longtime host of “Hardball” on MSNBC had been absent from MSNBC for several days, including from coverage of the highly significant South Carolina primary on Saturday night. He was also under attack by his own side for a variety of colorful comments that “triggered” his fellow pundits. A week or so ago, Matthews had compared the Bernie Sanders blitzkrieg through the first three primaries and caucuses to the march of the Germans through the Maginot Line in World War II. Since Sanders is Jewish, it was considered tasteless even though it was a brilliant analogy, taken from a book that Matthews was reading that week.
There were other comments as well, but we don’t need to list them. You can just figure that he offended some identity group with almost everything he said. He talked the way 70-something-year-old men talk, or used to talk before they became afraid to talk because it was inevitable they would offend someone.
No wonder MSNBC couldn’t stand it.
I’ve written about a few of the comments Matthews made this year, but not in a critical way. In January, back in the dark age of impeachment, Matthews was one of the few liberals who was willing to speak truth to the Democrat mob:
Chris Matthews of MSNBC probably disappointed a lot of radical Democrats Tuesday morning when he praised President Trump’s defense team and said that Trump is winning the PR battle as the impeachment trial begins in the Senate. Maybe it was the cold medicine talking, but Matthews sure sounded convinced that President Trump — the nemesis of MSNBC — was outmaneuvering Shifty Schiff and the rest of the impeachment coup crew.
Then, just two weeks ago, after the Nevada debate that exposed Mayor Mike Bloomberg as a milquetoast candidate, I highlighted Matthews’ commentary that compared the debate to a 1950’s boxing match that exposed Bloomberg as a candidate in serious need of a “cut man” to staunch the bleeding:
“It was boxing in the 1950s. You wait for the other guy — Carmen Basilio or somebody like that — to get a cut over their eye, and then you keep punching the cut over their eye over and over and over again. That’s what they did to Bloomberg.
Whether you liked Matthews or not, he was a much more honest political pundit than almost anyone on the left. He won’t disappear. He has too much yo say, and he has his supporters, too. You can see that MSNBC host Steve Kornacki was shocked and upset that Matthews was leaving. Kornacki had to pick up the reins and finish the show to talk about Matthews’ love of politics. You’ll see his initial reaction at the end of my video above, but later in the show as he praised Matthews, he broke up as he talked about how Matthews was not just a celebrity pundit but also a real person, a human, or as the Jews say, a “mensch.”
You can watch some of the greatest hits of Chris Matthews here:
