Chris Matthews does not let Ron Christie get away with misleading GOP talking points
Chris Matthews did what few journalists do these days. He immediately slammed a politician spewing misleading and false talking points. This is important because political talking points have a tendency to metastasize into a new reality after they are repeated over and over and broadcast by a generally willfully incompetent traditional mainstream media.
Republican spokesperson Ron Christie and Democratic spokesperson David Axelrod appeared on Chris Matthew’s hardball to discuss President Obama’s historic agreement with Iran. David Axelrod stated that the punishing sanctions imposed on Iran by President Obama was responsible for bringing Iran to the table. Axelrod said that the agreement if realized will help America avoid a military conflict with Iran.
Chris Matthews then asked Republican spokesperson Ron Christie to chime in. Ron Christie was ready with some of the most vile Republican talking points. He attempted to equate the agreement with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Adolf Hitler by ceding Sudetenland to Germany. Chris Matthews accused Ron Christie of a fundamental misunderstanding of that history. Moreover he accused him of completely contorting history to attempt to give his comparison some sort of relevance.
Matthews did not stop there however. He excoriated Ron Christie and the neocons. “I hope all the people who make these Hitler comparisons which are never apt, never apt, you should just stop doing that, these Hitler comparisons,” Chris Matthews said. “Five years from now, six years from now when this deal holds will come back and say ‘I said a lousy thing back in 2015. I compared this President to giving away Europe to Hitler. I will totally regret that the rest of my life.’ Like you guys ought to have been embarrassed about the Iraq war. And never apologized for that. You are wrong, wrong, wrong, over and over again and you never get ashamed of it. And you keep making the most outrageous things. Comparing this President to being in bed with Hitler is disgusting.”
David Axelrod then went on to tell Ron Christie that he neither understands history nor the Iran agreement. He told Christie he was just spouting Republican talking points.
Recently Republican Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson laid out why GOP operatives are making the rounds maligning the Iran agreement. “But I know what my political party wants,” Wilkerson said. “My political party, at least some of them — the 47 for example who signed the letter to the Ayatollah — they want war.”
This was refreshingly different from the lack of push-back during the ramp up to the Iraq war. Few journalists in the traditional mainstream media then would challenge the fallacies.