Chris Matthews asks the important questions

The increasingly-spooky Chris Matthews distinguished himself last week with two questions that show him to be the proper heir to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. First, in discussing Hillary Clinton's apparent reluctance to admit she made a mistake in voting for the Iraq war (for which she has drawn much criticism from liberal progressives):

MATTHEWS: You know, Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York, will not say what you just said. She has a way of skirting the issue. We had her spokesman on, Mr. [Howard] Wolfson, on last night who said there wouldn't have been a vote to allow force if the administration hadn't made the case it made.

But she won't say that she made a mistake. Is she hemmed in by the fact that she's a woman and can't admit a mistake, or else the Republicans will say, "Oh, that's a woman's prerogative to change her mind," or "another fickle woman?" Is her gender a problem in her ability to change her mind?

Dig how he says she has a way of "skirting" the issue, too. Pretty nice, huh? Then he went on to exemplify the way in which "Beltway people" like him really are separate from other Americans in their perception and in their thinking, asking this question:

MATTHEWS: Take a look at this very unpleasant bit of polling here. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, the one word descriptions of President Bush have turned incredibly negative with 48 percent -- I checked this twice, this, I couldn't believe it, but it's true -- 48 percent of the people responding to this poll used such words as "incompetent," "idiot," and "liar" to describe our president. Kate O'Beirne, what happened to respect?

Good question, Chris. I'm not Kate O'Beirne, but should you be up late some night running Yahoo! News searches on your own name and stumble across this blog, I think you deserve a good answer.

I think...I think trying to sell control of our ports to a country that gave aid and comfort to the terrorists who killed thousands of our citizens might have happened to respect.

I think packing the Supreme Court with justices who make few bones about their desire to repeal a law most Americans support might have happened to respect.

I think detaining prisoners indefinitely and torturing them might have happened to respect.

I think exploiting the civil rights of repressed minorities for political gain might have happened to respect.

I think the quagmire in Iraq might have happened to respect.

I think Bush showing that he is at the beck-and-call of religious fanatics to the extent of injecting himself and the government into private medical family decisions might have happened to respect.

But that is, of course, just one fellows' opinion.

Items courtesy of Media Matters.