Around HereBy Leo CoughlinI can't take it any more. I just have to get this off my chest before I (figuratively) explode. Is there any way to get Chris Matthews off the air? I will not test the hounds of fate and do, as Henry II did when perplexed with Thomas Becket and asked, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" That led directly to Becket's assassination by knights loyal to the king. I wish Matthews no harm to his person. Just get him off the broadcasting channels. Matthews is neither priest nor martyr. He is a jerk and is television's version of Budd Schulberg's famous character, Sammy Glick, the guy who was going to get ahead using every trick in the book. Matthews, the grinning, fast talking, saliva spewing, ambitious, main chance operator is, in my humble opinion, a jerk of the first water. On a television landscape that includes some prize examples of self-aggrandizing, uneducated, self-serving loudmouths, Matthews stands head and shoulders above all the rest. He tries to portray himself as a reporter and this fails. When stories around the world in dangerous places break out Matthews is always conspicuously absent. This pattern was set when he ducked the Vietnam War, leaving that nasty business to his contemporaries. Instead, he joined the Peace Corps, a notable hideout for cowards during the Vietnam time. When he left that he got a job on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., as a cop. This way he could make himself known to the power guys - and with his size (6-4), blond hair and very good looks he did just that. He wound up working for Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a whisky swilling, steak gobbling obscene broth of a Boston Irish politician whose very existence made Irishmen of value cringe. O'Neill became Speaker of the House and Matthews rode along with him. Matthews managed to wangle himself a job with the San Francisco Examiner (the paper where the well known self-aggrandizing Reg Murphy, a newspaper wrecker, held forth at one time) and later with the Chronicle in the same town. He was their Washington guy. Eventually he worked his way into the TV scene and became a jocular and friendly member of the McLaughlin group, run by a former priest who became notorious for other behavior. Next thing you know Glick Matthews has is own program in the start-up MSNBC venture, so hard up at the time they had a moron, Don Imus, doing a morning broadcast that had all the cognoscenti falling all over themselves to fawn over Imus, until he was dumped because of his racism. The self-aggrandizing, self-promoting, self-serving, self self self Mathews is on MSNBC. I can't stand him. I tune in for a few seconds every once in a while to see if NBC is still stupid enough to allow him air time. Some time ago the New York Times Sunday magazine did a piece on the clown, and really skewered him. He likes to come across as the brightest lad on the block, constantly throwing out bits of arcane knowledge (like so what?) and very often comes across as an overly precocious bar mitzvah boy. Matthews has a penchant for drooling over female guests. For example, he once said to Elizabeth Edwards, "You've got a great face, Elizabeth. I love your smile. ... I'm sorry. I don't want to patronize you. You're great." To Laura Ingraham: "I get in trouble for this, but you're great looking, obviously. You're one of the gods' gifts to men in this country." To CNBC's Erin Burnett: "You're beautiful . . . You're a knockout." One wonders how Kathleen, his wife, takes to Mr. Cutey's verbal passes at these women. The women, hearing his gushing, always appear very embarrassed. He is not above whooping up a lot of racial discord and animosity, blaming Southerners for their views in the typical way of a bigoted Yankee troublemaker. Enough of him!
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