Right after President Bush ended his farewell address last night, someone who wanted to know how quickly MSNBC would start throwing mudballs at Bush would have counted to about ten, as Keith Olbermann played anchorman for only a moment, pointing out Laura Bush and Dick Cheney and other faces in the East Room crowd, and then returned to form:
OLBERMANN; Is there anything wrong in feeling that they only thing missing tonight was another “Mission Accomplished” banner?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: The scary thing about the last eight years is that George Bush, whatever you think of him, came to office pretty much tabula rasa in terms of philosophy. He didn’t have much. He was a rich kid driving his father’s car. He got to be President because of his father, let’s face it, the same way he got into school and everything else, the same way he got his car probably. But the scary thing about Bush is somewhere he came to meet people like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz and Feith and the rest of them. They had this ideology that he bought in to, this ideology that somehow the United States in waging war and taking over countries somehow was fighting for freedom, and somehow in doing so we would encourage a moderation in the Arab world.
Well, history would have taught him, and I know he just put down history by quoting Jefferson, which was unfair to Jefferson, history would have told him that in the Arab world, it’s the Arab street, it’s the regular people out there, the vast population in numbers, who oppose the state of Israel, who have always been radicalized. It’s been the leaders that you could deal with, the potentates, the kings we set up over there, the British did, the people that were propped up with oil wealth. We could deal with those people, but the minute the street had a hand in the politics over there, it was radical….
There’s a real seething anger over there towards the West. We better start to figure it out instead of retreating to these notions that he’s been carrying around with him ever since he met Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives.
I go back to this. The scary thing about Bush is he picked up on — almost in the way that a hermit crab does — another identity in becoming President. He didn’t have a book knowledge to come to the White House with, having ignored and made fun of at college the pointy heads, he called them, or the intellectuals. He made fun of the smart kids at school and hung around with the jocks.
He decided he’s going to start listening to the intellectuals, so he said this Paul Wolfowitz is such a smart guy, let’s go with this neo-conservative idea, let’s go into Iraq. He listened to Dick Cheney, he listened to the rest of them. And, all of a sudden, he became this new scholar of freedom, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life selling this stuff. This stuff cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqis, it cost the lives of 4,000 U.S. service people, and we don’t know what’s coming around the corner in Iraq. The Brits took over that part of the world and turned it into a series of monarchies. We’ve taken over and we supply it with our ideology. Well, we’ll see if it lasts because, in the end, the Arabs are going to have their own culture, their own politics, and down the road, we’re going to have to make peace with the elements we can find to make peace with.
The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that’s going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he’s still selling it, and that’s the tragedy of the last eight years. He’s learned the wrong lessons, and he’s out there selling them again tonight.
OLBERMANN: To the very last. To the very last.
MATTHEWS: To the last.
This is hardly what Matthews did after Barack Obama’s dishonest race speech last March (the one in which he claimed he would never abandon the Rev. Wright, and then did within a month). He suggested the Elroy Jetsons of the world would be reading Obama as a classic American text, like Huckleberry Finn, a hundred years from now. This text from last night should be pulled up whenever Matthews gets defensive over criticism of an Obama speech.