THEY'RE SOOOO DUMB!!!

"Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
January 20, 1961

If my name were Kevin James, let me tell you what I would do: First, I would pick up a shovel, find a remote location somewhere out in the middle of a forest, and I would dig a deep hole (although not quite as deep as the one he dug for himself last night on MSNBC's Hardball). I would then place myself in that whole, and I would stay there for as long as it took for me to age to the degree where I was no longer even recognizable to my own family. When I emerged from that hole after a period of a decade and a half or so, I would change my name - just for good measure, you understand.
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The evening of May 15, 2008 was a night that will go down in history as one of the golden moments of Cable News Talk. When Chris Matthews dies (which I sincerely hope isn't for a very, very long time), the televised obituaries will carry the clip. Oh, I could view it all day and into the night and never get tired of it. The irony of it all is that last night was one of the few nights I didn't watch Hardball. I was dining with a friend at a Japanese restaurant in Monroe, NY called the Plum House. (By the way, if, perchance, you ever find yourself in this neck of the woods, I highly recommended the place). It was only when I woke up this morning that I managed to catch the interview in all its juicy entirety. What a delight! It was as good as it gets. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, Mr. Matthews!

First a little background. Yesterday, in a speech delivered in Israel, the man who was installed as president of the United States by an ideologically perverted Supreme court almost eight years ago, made a clumsy and ignorant reference to the Democratic nominee (Get used to the idea, Hillary) Barack Obama and his stubborn insistence that a nation must negotiate with its ideological enemies. Accusing the Illinois senator of appeasement, our esteemed halfwit-in-chief made the following incredible (given the location) statement:

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator [William Borah of Idaho] declared, 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The First Fool refuses to understand the first rule of international diplomacy: You talk to your friends. You negotiate with your enemies. That is why this administration's foreign policy has been such a sick joke and an unprecedented catastrophe.

On last night's installment of Hardball, Chris Matthews highlighted two opposing opinions with regard to the "appeasement" argument: Mark Green, President of Air America Radio, and Kevin James, a shrill, right wing talk show host who broadcasts out of Los Angeles. At one point, this nitwit used the appeasement of Hitler by the British government in 1938 as a modern day analogy to negotiating with Hamas. During the interview, he seemed to be giving the impression that he didn't know the difference between negotiation and appeasement. He didn't. The guy didn't even have an eighth grade level knowledge of world history. Said Chris, "Tell me what Neville Chamberlain did." For four or five minutes - but what must have seemed like four or five hours to Kevin James - he stayed glued to the main message of the GOP's talking points and could only shout out the same, stupid message:

"CHAMBERLAIN WAS AN APPEASER!"

He had absolutely no idea of the details of the infamous Munich Conference of September 1938 that enabled Hitler to annex a huge portion of Czechoslovakia, nor the "peace in our time" debacle that resulted from it. It was obvious that he didn't even know who the hell Neville Chamberlain was. The "discussion" (if that's what you want to call it) ended this way:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: You don't know what you're talking about, Kevin. You don't know what you're taking about. Tell me what Chamberlain did wrong.

KEVIN JAMES: Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, Chris! Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, all right?

CM: I've been sitting here for five minutes asking you to say what the president was referring to in 1938 at Munich.

KJ: I don't know.

CM: You don't know, thank you.

Twenty-four times Matthews tried to get this screaming jackass to define Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in Munich seventy years ago. Twenty-four times James just could not do it. It really was a beautiful thing to behold. A shell shocked and somewhat embarrassed Mark Green, watching this spectacle transpire before his disbelieving eyes, was finally able to blurt out, "Kevin, when you're in a hole, you stop digging." To think that this nitwit actually gets paid as a political commentator - and I write this stuff for nothing. Life is sort of funny that way, isn't it?

Ah! It was classic, right wing, unintentional comedy at its finest! One of the joys of any progressive with a warped sense of humor (that would include yours truly) is watching these assholes make utter fools of themselves. I mean, they're the gift that just keeps giving and giving! I remember a day back in 2000. I was driving through central Pennsylvania, listening to one of these reactionary twits bloviating from a station somewhere in Ohio. At the time, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was working for the presidential campaign of Al Gore. All of the sudden - to even my surprise (these knuckleheads really have to work at it to surprise me) - the guy starts criticizing Daley for his actions during the Democratic convention riots of 1968. My main point of contention with this silly argument is the inconvenient little fact that the Mayor Daley of 1968 was by this time long dead - having died in 1978, over two decades before! The Mayor Daley of 2000 was his son Richard, Jr. Because the signal was faint, I literally had to pull over to the side of the highway to listen. On and on he went for five or six minutes. I waited and waited for one of his staff or his many sycophantic callers to correct him on this major faux pas. Of course, not one of them had the intelligence to even notice that he had committed one. It truly was a sublime moment in the annals of far-right idiocy - as good as it gets.

The very fact that fools such as this have overtaken the people's airwaves since Reagan deregulated the FCC a generation ago is symptomatic as to why Americans in general are the most gut-bustingly stupid people on the planet. That really wasn't the case forty and fifty years ago. Our parents and grandparents went to the polls with a fairly good idea of what the critical issues were that this country might have been facing at any particular point in time. That is no longer true. At this moment, one of the main subjects of America's national political dialogue is whether or not Senator Obama is an "elitist" because of the type of food he prefers to eat. That's what it has come to! That's how dumbed down this country has become. Do you need any more evidence? Just take one good look at the inarticulate madman sitting in the Oval Office that a huge percentage (although not most) of American people naively sent to the White House - not once - but twice. Need I go on? I thought not. Please, If I sound to you a bit smug, forgive me but I've earned the right to be so. All true progressives have.

If you ever have a chance, check out the Kennedy/Nixon debates from September 1960. You can probably order a video of it to rent at your local library. The first thing one notices when viewing that historical event is the fact that both men, for the most part, are speaking as if they assume that the average citizen has an attention span of better than three seconds. Say what you want about Jack 'n' Dick, imperfect men thought they were (especially Nixon - Heavens to Betsy!), they both had a healthy respect for the intelligence of the American people. Now let us fast forward that tape to the autumn of 2000. When I videotaped the Gore/Bush debates, I labeled that particular cassette, "Dumb and Dumber: The Sequel". Seriously!

As the bumper sticker on my old pick up once declared, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." Thankfully, the public is finally starting to pay half-hearted attention to what is happening to their once-great nation. Sadly, it is not out of any sincere desire to learn and understand affairs of state, but only because events are starting to effect them personally - gas prices, the food crisis, the sinking economy, etc. But at least as the infrastructure of this country collapses all around us; as millions lose their jobs; as millions more are thrown into the kind of grinding, mass poverty America has not known since the gilded age of the Robber Barons over a century ago; as the middle class of this country slowly but surely ceases to even exist; as America confronts the coming socio-economic catastrophe brought on by three decades of corruption and incompetence....we will at least have the solace of knowing that the the loony right wing will be entertaining us into oblivion with gales of unintentional laughter for decades to come!

Thank goodness for these little blessings.

Tom Degan
from the Cornwall, NY Library
tomdegan@frontiernet.net
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Here is a link to a video of the Matthews/James confrontation and meltdown. It literally has to be seen to be believed. Enjoy!

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/85620/