Probably because it goes completely unnoticed within the milieu in which Matthews operates in. Or as Kate McMillan of Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog wrote a few years ago, “scratch a progressive, and you’ll find a misogynist.” But at the Daily Caller, Amy Siskind writes:
Well, apparently Chris Matthews missed President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Speech. The speech in which the president called for civility and toning down the rhetoric. Either that, or Matthews prefers to ignore it!
On the eve of the SOTU, Chris Matthews was back on familiar ground: demeaning women in power. Matthews’s latest target: Representative Michele Bachmann. In fact, Matthews got so wound up in his misogyny that he lost his composure and control. He referred to Representative Bachmann as a “balloon head” three times; referred to her as “this woman” five times (foregoing the proper salutation of Congresswoman or Representative), and just for good measure, used an alleged quote from Stephen Schmidt: “She doesn’t know anything.”
That’s in a span of three minutes. Honestly, how is this women-hatred tolerated by MSNBC without rebuke?
Given how ubiquitious it’s been amongst the network’s anchors, perhaps MSNBC should work it into their next ad campaign:
Related: Speaking of NBC, James Taranto spots an alumnus of Saturday Night Live engaged in similarly misogynistic behavior:
Nor is dehumanizing left-wing rhetoric limited to the world of high art. It can be found in popular culture as well. Blogger Howard Portnoy notes a video in which Tracy Morgan, until 2006 a member of the Now Ready for Prime Time Players on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” banters with basketball sportscasters on the TNT cable network. (TNT is part of the Turner Broadcasting System subdivision of Time Warner.)
One of the hosts jocularly asks Morgan: “Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?” Fey was the former “Saturday Night Live” player who returned to the program in 2008 to perform a refulgent impression of the newly famous Palin. Another host elaborates: “Sarah Palin is good-looking, isn’t she? Tina Fey is good-looking!”
The query is frivolous, but Morgan’s answer is indecent: “Yo, let me tell you something about Sarah Palin, man. She’s good masturbation material. The glasses, and all of that? Great masturbation material.”
Portnoy observes: “For a liberal male, the degradation of Palin as sexual fodder–which frankly is about as low as one can go in degrading a member of the so-called ‘fairer sex’–is a way of dismissing the fact that (like it or not) she is a difference maker in the American body politic. But why is it that the nation’s most accomplished liberal females haven’t spoken up against this unseemly treatment?”
The answer, as we argued last Wednesday, is that liberal women are the driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin. But Portnoy’s complaint about male liberals–the word “men” doesn’t quite seem appropriate here–echoes ours: “Liberal men [sic] put down Palin as a cheap way to score points with the women in their lives, or they use her as an outlet for more-general misogynistic impulses that would otherwise be socially unacceptable to express.”
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