Asking the Important Questions

“Newt Gingrich asks Chris Matthews, ‘What kind of racist thinking do you have?’”

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday from the Republican National Convention, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took on host Chris Matthews, who accused the Republican Party of playing the “race card” throughout the day on MSNBC.

Gingrich turned the tables on Matthews, asking: “Why do you assume ‘food stamp’ refers to black? What kind of racist thinking do you have? Why are you being a racist, because you assume he’s referring to black?”

In a testy exchange, Matthews asked Gingrich why his party was using what he deemed coded racist dog whistles.

“I find your assumption so absurd that it’s hard to answer your question,” Gingrich responded. “Let me take the birther thing for a second — what Mitt Romney did the other day, people say, ‘You ought to relax, you ought to be a little bit lighter’. So he tells a joke. Now, it tends to be a joke that serves him in a totally different way that you’re calculating. It reminds everybody in Michigan that he was born in Michigan.”

And as John Nolte writes at Big Journalism, regarding Matthews’ earlier, spittle-flecked exchange with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough are Matthews’ enablers today:

Chris Matthews being Chris Matthews — a spittle-flecked, unhinged water carrier for Obama — isn’t news . Matthews knows His Precious One is losing and just can’t emotionally deal with that fact. Moreover, Matthews is the one who needs to do a little racial soul-searching. After all, he’s the one who automatically associates the word “welfare” with “black people.”

What is noteworthy, however, is that as Matthews launches his rabid and irresponsible racialist smear against RNC Chair Reince Priebus, both Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough just sit there like cowards as Matthews does the impossible: allows his lunacy of lies to give the Peacock Network yet another black eye.

When Brokaw finally retires from NBC, I wonder if anyone will ask him about what it was like to be associated with the once-proud network as Matthews became increasingly unhinged, and it brought in first Keith Olbermann and then Al Sharpton?

Related: “Media Scandalology: Cui Bono?“, James Bowman asks at the New Criterion. And elsewhere, a new video smuggled out of the People’s Republic of Sulzberger diagrams exactly how the MSM makes its sausage tofu for leftwing consumption: