SOME REPUBLICANS SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM MSNBC’S “HARDBALL”

…Republican “talking-points” expert, Ron Christie

Finally, an MSNBC host calls out a true Neocon for spewing their vile talking points.

I am both a fan and a real critic of Chris Matthew’s Hardball cable TV program.  As a critic, being the show's host, Chris tends to interrupt his guests a lot, and that drives me crazy.

But I am also a major critic of the Republican mouth-piece, Ron Christie.  This highly ambitious neocon political analyst was a former member of Vice President’s Dick Cheney’s staff and a Dubya Bush adviser.  (Not exactly the best references to have on your resume’ today.) Mr. Christie seems many times to be a guest on the political cable shows, just for sticking up for the former vice president and the Bush administration.  He therefore spends a lot of time on both MSNBC and Fox News talk programs.

As occurs on the many of the political shows that regularly invite politicians as guests, I sometimes also get upset that the show’s hosts tend to feed softball questions to their TV guests.  This is probably just so the guest will continue to come on their shows, or at least they won’t refuse to answer the host’s light-weight questions.

But this week, Chris Matthews did what only a very few political show hosts will do in today’s competitive cable environment. 

The whole thing started when Ron Christie and the Democratic spokesperson, David Axelrod, appeared on Hardball for discussing President Obama's potential historic agreement with Iran.

Axelrod started by saying that the punishing sanctions imposed on Iran by President Obama was responsible for bringing Iran to the table.  Axelrod then continued that the agreement, if realized, will help America avoid a military conflict with Iran. 

But when Matthews asked the Republican Christie to chime in, Ron Christie took off with some of the most vile of Neocon talking points. He, with a straight face, attempted to equate the Iran agreement with the 1930’s British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Adolf Hitler of ceding a big chunk of Europe to Hitler’s Germany.

Chris is usually very polite when Ron Christie is his guest, but this time Christie went way over the edge.

After hearing Christie’s spewing of his misleading and totally false Republican talking-points, Matthews went directly at Christie and didn’t let up.

First, Matthews accused Ron Christie of having a fundamental misunderstanding of that time in history.  He then accused him of completely contorting history in a vain attempt for giving his bizarre comparison some sort of relevance.

But Chris wasn’t stopping there.

Matthews severely criticized  Christie and his fellow neocons. "I hope all the people who make these Hitler comparisons which are never apt, never apt, you should just stop doing that, these Hitler comparisons," Matthews said. "Five years from now, six years from now when this deal holds [you] will come back and say 'I said a lousy thing back in 2015. I compared this President to giving away Europe to Hitler. I will totally regret that the rest of my life.'  Like you guys ought to have been embarrassed about the Iraq war. And [you] never apologized for that. You are wrong, wrong, wrong, over and over again and you never get ashamed of it. And you keep making the most outrageous things. Comparing this President to being in bed with Hitler is disgusting."

But the comments didn’t stop there.

David Axelrod then took over and started telling Christie that he neither understands his history, nor what’s in the Iran agreement. He told Christie all he was doing was spouting rehearsed Republican talking points with absolutely no basis in fact.

As it turns out, there aren’t a lot of them, but there are some Republicans that agree with what Matthews and Axelrod were saying.

As an example, recently the retired Republican, US Army Colonel, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State, Colin Powell, laid out why GOP operatives are making the rounds maligning the Iran agreement. "I know what my political party wants," Wilkerson said. "My political party, at least some of them — the 47 for example who signed the letter to the Ayatollah — they want a war with Iran.”

Ron Christie was a real supporter of the war in Iraq and he continually says the US was right to go to war in Iraq.  This is even though most historians agree that there would probably not be the terrorist group ISIL and Syria would not be in continual civil war, if the Iraq war had not occurred.  And almost everyone feels that the winner of the Iraq war was Iran, not the US or the people of Iraq. 

 

It’s the Ron Christies, Dick Cheney’s and the other war mongers in Congress that are now against the current negotiations with Iran, and yes, they apparently do want another war in the Middle East.

But regardless of how these Iran negotiations go, it was great to see the host Chris Matthews go after Ron Christie as he did, and all Christie could do was shake his head.  He truly has no argument for saying what Matthews and Axelrod were saying was not true.

It doesn’t happen very often, but this time this outburst against a true neocon sure felt good.

Copyright G.Ater  2015