politics

Chris Matthews Whiffs at a Fat, Slow One

September 3, 2004

Around 5:30 p.m. yesterday, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews conducted a brief interview with former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson. Simpson (apparently taking his cue from Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert) employed the “I-wasn’t-there-and-I’m-not-sure-and-theres-no-proof-or-anything-like-that-but-something-sure-smells-fishy-about-all-this” school of rhetoric to slime his party’s opponent.

“In four months of service,” Simpson said in reference to John Kerry, “it’s very difficult for this cowboy to understand how you get three purple hearts. Just mark it down, that’s all I’m saying.” It was the equivalent of a Democrat going on the air and saying, “Well, I’ve heard George Bush used to do a lot of cocaine 30 years ago, and I know it’s tough to stop doing drugs, so it’s just difficult for this American to understand how it could be that he’s not still coked up to the gills every day. Just mark it down, that’s all I’m saying.”

Matthews, to his credit, pounced, asking Simpson, somewhat incredulously, “You don’t think he would have inflicted those wounds himself?” A little bit after backing off slightly in response to that question, Simpson changed course and gave us his imitation of a crystal ball reader:

I think what you’re going to find, they’re going to go into his records just as they would yours or mine or anybody else’s. They’re going to go into Edwards, and guess who will do that? The media. They’re going to pick the leaves off the onion and they’ll go goofy with these two guys in the next two months.

Simpson seems to be implying, first, that there are somewhere copious records detailing Kerry wartime indiscretions that the media has so far ignored, and second, that John Edwards has something to account for about his own Vietnam era behavior. Whereas in fact, thanks to the media’s belated investigation into the dubious allegations of the creatively-named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Kerry’s war records have already been examined more closely than a urine sample from Marion Jones; and Edwards didn’t even enter the draft lottery until 1972, a year at the tail-end of the war and, more importantly, a year in which no one was called up.

So how did Matthews respond? He grinned at Simpson and exclaimed, “Sounds good to me!”

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Well, Chris, it didn’t sound so good to us. To us, it sounded like an on-air reporter letting a ludicrous hypothetical speculation, meant to tar a candidate, go unchallenged.

–Brian Montopoli

Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.