Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, January 08, 2009 11:32:31 AM
Speculation ran hot that Chris Matthews would abandon his television
career to run against Arlen Specter in 2010 for the US Senate. After
all, if an angry clown like Al Franken can do it, why not a
journalistic joke? Unfortunately for television but fortunately for
Pennsylvania, Matthews has decided to stay on the air
I’d like to think that Matthews wouldn’t have had a chance in
Pennsylvania, but Minnesotans have little room to heap scorn on
egotistic celebrities who run for high political office with little
qualification. Hopefully, Pennsylvanians would have had more sense
than we showed in this past election. In any case, they won’t have to
make that choice now, unless Terrell Owens returns and runs for Senator
instead of Matthews.
What does this mean for MS-NBC? They get to keep their Thrill Twins
together for at least a few more years, obsequiously offering paeans to
Barack Obama and attacking his critics. Perhaps Keith Olbermann will
make me his Worst Person in the World for pointing this out, but
Matthews has a much more powerful platform at MS-NBC to conduct
politics than he would in the US Senate. No one at NBC apparently
wants to exercise any editorial control over the “thrill up his leg”
hackery, plus they’re still willing to pay him millions along with
Olbermann to give a nightly re-enactment of Peter Finch’s
scenery-chewing in Network. Why would he trade that to be one of 100 voices on C-SPAN2?