Chris Matthews' Eliminationist Rhetoric

Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

They come walk in the door, we would like you to sign this and Peter King is waiting for them. Peter King, does he want to have to sign that? He doesn’t want to not sign it. Pat Meehan, Mike Fitzpatrick, Gerlach, these other guys, they’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute, if I don’t sign this, then they’ll be able to go out and announce — the Democrats — that I, representing a lot of working, middle class families that I’ve said no to minimum wage.’ I think it’s a great way to screw the other side into doing something you want them to do. And it’s a win-win, because if they don’t do it, you kill them in November.

Chris Matthews of MSNBC yesterday, as spotted by Real Clear Politics.

National Journal’s Michael Hirsh wants to raise the bar on decorum to an entirely new level. On Thursday’s MSNBC airing of “Hardball,” Hirsh told host Chris Matthews certain “gun” terms should be stricken from political discourse and referred to instances where Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle used such off-limits language.

“Well we don’t want any more duels and thankfully that was the last one,” Hirsh said. “[B]ut the point I was trying to make is you can draw a line particularly in the use of certain kinds of metaphors. The use of gun metaphors – killing, murdering, taking out, which was another metaphor for a – Michele Bachmann used in one of her statements, Sharon Angle – the Nevada Senate candidate’s now infamous comment about quote, unquote, ‘second amendment remedies’ to deal with the problem Harry Reid, her opponent.”

His proposal? Make such language inappropriate in the same racial slurs are inappropriate.

That’s the kind of language I think we got to have a hard think about now,” Hirsh said. “Do we really want to continue to use that kind of language at these levels? Or, should there be kind of a social sanction, not a legal one, but a moral sanction in the way that we’ve stopped using certain epithets like the ‘n’-word public forums. Stop using that kind of language, those kinds of metaphors.”

—The Daily Caller, January 21st, 2011.

Baed on the NBC transcript of that segment, Matthews agreed with Hirsh’s suggestion for the media to dial back their rhetoric; but as with the rest of the American left, he quickly forgot his pledge for a new civility.