Chris Matthews continued his tirade against factual inaccuracy by high-profile Republicans on Thursday's "Hardball." Matthews laid into his now-favorite target, Michele Bachmann, for a third straight day. (On Tuesday, he called Bachmann a "balloon head," and on Wednesday, he said she showed "profound ignorance.") But he also added Sarah Palin to his enemies list.
Matthews was speaking to Politics Daily's Melinda Henneberger and Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, but his guests could barely get a word in, so all-consuming was Matthews' incredulity about the statements Bachmann and Palin were making. He first played the clip of Sarah Palin calling President Obama's "Sputnik moment" line a "WTF moment," and seeming to say that, while it was true that the U.S. had fallen behind in the space race after its launch, Sputnik proved so costly for the Soviet Union that the country collapsed under the weight of the resultant debt.
Matthews could not believe what he was hearing. He pointed out that the U.S. had, in fact, won the space race, and that the Soviet Union had collapsed nearly forty years after Sputnik.
"Who is writing this garbage for her?" Matthews asked Henneberger, giving the word "garbage" a French-sounding twist. "Who is putting this stuff in her head?"
Things continued in that vein, with Henneberger and Marshall making, at most, minor contributions to Matthews' rolling monologue. He got plenty of digs at Bachmann in, saying, "let's not call facts in any way related to Michele Bachmann," and positing that she had never seen the words "scourge" or "Iwo Jima" before saying them out loud in recent speeches, since she did not pronounce them correctly.
"I don't want to go crazy about this, but it's insane that a political party would consider people like this for president," Matthews said. "It's insane."
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