In what looks to a be a first, the lead story on The New Yorker magazine’s website is from a blog. New Yorker staff writer Henrdrik Hertzberg, who maintains maybe the nation’s best political blog, writes a piece “In Defense of Chris Matthews,” as the NYer sub-headline states. Since we accidentally pissed off Mattews this week, here are some positives about MSNBC’s lead personality:
Chris was quite clearly against the Iraq War when that position was unpopular with Americans in general and cable blowhards in particular. Yes, he is prone to hyperbole. Yes, he is apt to tell a guest that he or she is a “great American” whose current collection of ill-researched columns is “a great book.” Yes, his obsession with cultural-populist tropes, especially the horseshit assumption that the ideal male, maybe even the default human being, is a fortyish white non-intellectual in a baseball cap holding a can of beer, is annoying at best. Yes, the internal censor that keeps most peoples’ ids in check functions rather intermittently in his case. But that reckless freedom of his yields at least as many brilliant connections and startling metaphors as it does howlers.Chris Matthews is a net plus for American politics and American society.
If he decides to pack it in and run for office, I plan to max out.
Matthews was right on the most important issue of our time—Iraq—and is the best thing on cable news today save Karl Rove.
TAGS: beer, free, Iraq, New York, political, Politics, war
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