Matthews’ eyes lit up, and his voice rose in excitement as he pitched:

MATTHEWS: Let me tell you something. I‘ll say it here a thousandth time. Watch Rudolph Giuliani. Watch him. Security is the issue in this country. Whoever is the next president is going to be seen as more on the ball than even this president on security and terrorism. This country is not going soft on terrorism. We are going to get smarter on it is my hunch.


And Rudy is the guy to do it. And he can be an SOB in many ways. But this country may really want an SOB, a really tough cop as the next president. So watch Rudy, I‘m saying it. (MSNBC Hardball Transcript, Jan. 25, 2006)


Dana Milbank’s shootdown was a bit hilarious:

MATTHEWS: First, Rudolph Giuliani, the pro-choice, pro-gay rights, former mayor spent today, or the day in Orlando speaking to a conference of Evangelicals.


[CHRIS GETTING NEARLY BREATHLESS HERE] Dana, he‘s up to it, isn‘t he? This is below the radar. This is Rudy campaigning for president in the south.


MILBANK: This is about as convincing as Jerry Falwell at the gay pride parade.


So what’s my problem with Chris? Tweety seems to have a big-time, hard-on thaaaaaaang for tough-guy, rough-’em-up, big-hat-bigger-fist-biggest-balls-ever politicians. And, some leftie bloggers are righteously pissed off at being compared by Matthews to Osama bin Laden, and have organized a campaign and boycott:

Chris Matthews has repeatedly compared Americans who are concerned about the war in Iraq to Osama bin Liden. We are asking companies to refrain from advertising on Matthews’ MSNBC TV show “Hardball” until he publicly apologizes and promises to stop his right-wing bias. READ MORE


At the “Open Letter to Chris Matthews” site, you can sign up your blog, and you can post a letter to Matthews. This effort has been endorsed by Peter Daou of Daou Report and many familiar bloggers. Peter Daou perhaps summed up the reasoning behind this the best:

To understand the methodology of the story-telling media, look no further than two situations currently occupying the energy of netroots activists: Chris Matthews’ equating of bin Laden and Michael Moore and Tim Russert’s racially-tinged, guilt-by-association line of questioning in a recent interview with Barack Obama. … continued below ….

In each instance, the meta-theme is that Democrats are terrorist-lite traitors, and the subtext is that Bush and Republicans are the true patriots. But while the netroots is blasting away at Matthews and Russert, the Democratic establishment is petrified at the thought of offending the Gang of 500. So far, only John Kerry and Louise Slaughter have weighed in on either scandal.

"Flip-flop" took hold as an anti-Kerry theme because it was repeated ad nauseum in the press. And mind you, reporters are far too sophisticated to simply deliver the meme as an accusation; they frame it as a question, they toss it in as an offhanded remark, they run a caption that says it for them, they use the language of Democratic duality and Republican unity, they use polls for cover, they play false equivalency games, they allow Republicans to repeat the narrative unhindered, and so on. This despite the fact that Bush contradicted himself on major policy issues and was a master ‘flip-flopper’ himself. Had the media fact-checked the assertion every time it popped up and had they called Bush a flip-flopper with the same brutal, methodical intensity, the race might have ended differently. One of the few chances Americans got to test the flip-flop meme was the debates, and we all know how those turned out.

The same holds true for the Swift-boat sliming of Kerry: much has been made of the Kerry campaign’s response or lack thereof, but there’s another angle less discussed: the story was a cable staple for days and weeks, unchecked. Had the cable nets and other media outlets covered that story with more balance, more dignity, more judiciousness, more responsibility, it would have been a sideshow. And this has nothing to do with deflecting blame – the Kerry campaign should have known that their enemy wasn’t a vindictive crackpot like John O’Neill, but the many ‘journalists’ and media outlets who rammed the story down our collective gullets.

Similarly, the media helped reframe John Murtha’s call for a dramatic shift in strategy in Iraq as a policy of “cut and run” versus Bush’s “steadfastness.” Once again, the storyline trumps the story.

To illustrate the power of the media to shape public opinion, simply imagine what would happen if the cable nets and the print media and the elite punditocracy treated the warrantless spying scandal with the same round-the-clock intensity as the Swift-boating of Kerry or the Natalee Holloway disappearance. Suppose Lewinsky-style headlines blared about impeachment and presidential law-breaking. Suppose the question of the day on every cable net was, “Should Bush be impeached for violating the Constitution?” The media can create a crisis — and can squelch one. The media can deliver narratives, they can frame events, they can shape the way Americans see the political landscape. A disproportionate amount of power is wielded by a handful of opinion-shapers, and when these individuals tell America a story that favors the right and marginalizes the left, the remedies are few.

Progressive bloggers and the millions of online activists whose conversations they shepherd are fighting to close the triangle. Sadly, Democrats will resist, out of fear. And the press will fight back, hard. Not to mention the anticipated wrath of the rightwing machine, built on the "liberal media" myth. Still, the latent power of the netroots is ignored at the political and media establishment’s peril.


And Kos, a co-sponsor of the Matthews Letter blog, has weighed in with a hat tip to Digby’s great rant on Chris Matthews and Deborah Howell:

Great post by Digby. I don’t even know where to start excerpting, so go read it all. But here’s something to whet your appetite:

This is why we out in the hinterland are alarmed by people like Deborah Howell and Chris Matthews. These are people who are not open partisans. Yet by “gentlemean’s agreement” they take for granted certain negative assumptions about Democrats and pump them out into the body politic. It has been so internalized that they seem to not even know they are doing it. In a world where toxic liberal-eliminationist rhetoric is openly celebrated as “mainstream” and where liberals are commonly derided as cowardly and denounced as treasonous, this is very disturbing indeed.


Check out the Matthews letter blog site.