Like a radio hate jock, Matthews gets by on being outrageous and brash. He substitutes outrageous comment for intelligent and brash for original.

Why does he get away with it? Because he is cocksure of himself. He is Rush Limbaugh with a screen and without the unctuous aroma of hair pomade.

So why do we respond to him? Like Rush and his ilk, Tweety should simply be ignored. Intellectual bully that he is, if he is ignored, he will shrivel up and blow away--or, less hopefully--come slinking back to the herd, by modifying his jejune commentary. He is an attention junky, and the less we give him, the more we will control him.

Tweety, Timmy Russert, O'Reilly and the rest of the gang used to rile me up. Fearing for the remains of my sanity, I gave myself a communications frontal lobotomy by simply refusing to watch any of them. You would be surprised at how invigorating this can be. I can still quite easily keep up with what the Repugs are up to by watching George Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning, watching the Lehrer Report and listening to NPR. I know they are still out there. . . .and that they could still win.

But why put up with arrogant abuse, sloppy misrepresentation, bias and outright lies when you don't have to?

When someone says, "Wanna watch Hardball?" Just say "No!"

The whole "ignore them and they'll go away" doesn't seem to work. I mean, these people got as big as they did while we were ignoring them. Reagan laid the groundwork for his 1980 campaign by sending recorded opinion pieces to AM radio stations in what the bicoastal elites call "flyover country." He was ignored, and ridiculed as a candidate, until he won. Rush Limbaugh was some jerk on AM radio until he built up such a following that he burst onto TV, satellite radio, and other outlets that a few years before had seemed unthinkable. Most of us who would rather ignore them still find it hard to grasp the scope and organization of things like the militant Christian media and networking -- all of which was built while we were ignoring them.

Please don't get me wrong, I wish they would go away and we could have an America where people civilly disagree (I have to add that liberals also did their part to trash civil discourse in the 1960s by shouting variations of "Fuck!" as a form of disagreement). But they're here and they're loud and they deserve to be picked apart as Matthews once was on "The Daily Show."

Rudy Giulliani left cold New Hampshire for warm Florida in the middle of winter. This is campaign strategy - If you've got all those political donations to spend, and your candidacy is going nowhere, wouldn't you head south for the winter? Seems like a no-brainer, to me.

I know Matthews is an easy target, but c'mon, like 6 people watch his show, and they are just the people he has on the show all the time. If we all just ignore him he will go away.

The talking heads ie Hannity, Limbaugh, and I guess Matthews are pushing HARD for their boyfriend Giuliani. I look forward to their disappointment when he finally quits the race.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAkIidChxic&eurl=http://www.talkleft.com/

it should be eliminated by the fact that Giuliani is still considered a serious candidate (or was ever considered "inevitable"). Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, more than any voters in this country, are keeping Rudy in the debates and in the headlines.

That being said, I hope Rudy kicks butt in Florida, a winner take all primary, because I really, really, really want to see the republicans go into super Tuesday with 4 "strong" candidates, all of whom consider themselves frontrunners. I'm stocking up on popcorn and merlot for the evening.

He is a giuliani supporter which is truly nauseating considering Tip O'Neil was his mentor. Tip is spinning in his grave over what has happened to his ungrateful student...

Well, maybe because Rudy is an epic, lying, self-promoting sleazebag lunatic? And Matthews is .. well, the same?

Rudy is going to kick ass when 9/11 votes in their primary.

I don't see any great difference between him and anyone else on television. Nor do I see anything fundamentally untruthful in what Matthews was saying, unless we're deciding to parse words and not meaning. It's true that Giuliani is banking on Florida as his first big win -- that's no secret. So why the hate? It's petty and unbecoming, not to mention pointless.

in his belief that he doesn't report the news, he creates it out of whole cloth. Or scraps. Or imaginary scraps.

Chris Matthews...king maker.

It's a not-so-secret secret that the network giants have each chosen "their guy", and each is busy distorting the news to influence the election outcome in favor of "their guy".

Or maybe he's not so deluded. If people don't believe what you want them to...say they do anyway, and remarkably, they will. Public Opinion and Propaganda 101. Chris obviously took the class in communications school.

The media has found an attractive model in the Bushies' "if we say it, it's true" mantra. Matthews, Russert, Imus, Limbaugh, Malkin, Hannity, O'Reilly and Company are unencumbered by fact. They spout and bloviate and pontificate and prevaricate to their hearts' content, confident that there are few among us who will point out lies and errors and fewer who will ever bother to get the real story. That's why Cafferty and Blitzer can go on CNN and tell their viewers that Rudy has yet to compete in any primaries. In the old days of real news, that kind of nonsensical crap would get you fired. Now, it makes you a celebrity. We are well beyond the time when the networks were interested in news. We live in a time when he who shouts loudest and gets the biggest rating book holds sway.

Isn't it incredible, looking back, that CBS actually fired Rather for a mistake in accepting a forged document about the reality of the Bush military record? Isn't even more incredible that the same network refused to do anything remotely resembling investigative reporting to get to the heart whether Bush actually fulfilled his military obligation?

Such is the sorry state of the news business today when a guy like Matthews, in his homo-erotic fantasies about the masculinity of Thompson and Romney, is taken seriously.