RUSH: Media implosion time. Time to illustrate. Chris Matthews, we have a couple of sound bites from Hardboiled last night. First, on Christine O’Donnell…
WOMAN: Yeah!
MATTHEWS: — Randy Scheunemann, this intellectual that is supposedly, uhh, making Sarah Palin into something of an intellectual, complete talking points. Eh, eh, eh, eh, anybody can be reading this crap! She should be a Dittohead.
RUSH: (laughing) He’s talking about whoever this Scheunemann guy is that’s writing the talking points for O’Donnell and Palin. ‘Anybody can read this crap.’ Who is it that’s got the teleprompter, cannot live without it, Chris? Who is it? Who is the smartest guy in politics? Who’s the most brilliant man to ever trod the political soil? Who is it that was gonna make the world love us, who was gonna lower the seas — who was going to make sure that there was no racism and partisanship, total unity? Who was it, this bright, articulate, young, clean guy? Who is it that can’t survive in a classroom of eight-year-olds without a teleprompter? Is that Christine O’Donnell? Is that Sharron Angle? Or would that be Barack Obama? We all know the answer. Matthews gives one of these big time commentaries last night about the Chilean miners.
MATTHEWS: What a story of human faith, hope, charity — and, yes, community. I know that last word drives the right crazy: Community. Theirs is the popular notion that it’s every man for himself. Grab what you can, screw the masses, and cash out the government, the whole cowboy catechism. But how would those miners have survived and their loved ones living above if they’d behaved like that with the attitude of ‘every man for himself’? This coming election now looks to be a process very different. What it promises to be is a huge number of Americans withdrawing their confidence in the ability of us to work together, and to build a common community. It’s headed towards something quite un-American, a statement that we are not all (mumbles) in this together. For that I blame the people, even now, [who] seek to meet their need for notoriety by nightly yelling ‘Fire!’ in the movie theater by convincing those who still have jobs that their worst enemies are those who (screaming) DON’T!
RUSH: I, for the life of me, do not know what he’s talking about. The people who still have jobs, their worst enemies are those who don’t? Does this make any sense? ‘The ability of us to work together to build a common community’? Didn’t we elect a guy who said he was going to do that? We’ve got more divisions, racial and otherwise, political, than we had when this guy was immaculated. Anyway this is all emblematic of the implosion taking place. There was supposed to be magic. Things that had never happened before were supposed to happen just by virtue of Obama taking the oath of office and assuming his rightful post in the Oval ‘Orifice,’ and we all know now it’s not. This Peter Baker piece in the New York Times has got them all discombobulated. The thing we talked about yesterday shows up Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, and now they’re all beside themselves.
Obama’s making excuses for himself, apologizing, admitting to his mistakes, admitting he has to learn. Really what he’s done is throw the media overboard because he has essentially said they lied about him when they told us how brilliant he was, how competent, how capable, how wonderful. They’re the ones that sold us on this bill of goods of Obama. They are the ones that passed off this messianic impression. Now, Obama goes to the pages of the New York Times and blows it sky-high, and who is it that takes the lumps for that? It’s people like Matthews and these other clowns who spread this drivel that a community organizer (who is the least qualified man in any room he walks into, no matter what room it is) was the best thing that ever happened to American politics. Now he’s telling them that he’s not and never was. It’s gotten so bad, the ego is so bad, that if he can’t make it, nobody can be great.
If Obama can’t be a great president, damn it, nobody can, ’cause there’s nobody better than Obama, and if he can’t pull it off then the system’s so screwed up and Washington’s so screwed up, nobody can do it. Poor Obama. He had the media in one hand; he had the Congress in the other hand. He had the world media helping him out. He had everybody telling lies about his qualifications. This guy had everybody covering up all the negative stuff. Nobody did one anal exam of him. Nobody did any due diligence. Nobody delved into his past to tell the American people just who the guy is, ’cause it didn’t matter. He was constructed as somebody to be whatever any individual wanted him to be. Now the crash to reality and the media is imploding.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s old Chris Matthews lamenting the fact that the miners would be dead, the miners would be dead if left to people like the Tea Party. Hey, Chris, a quick question. Can you provide me a list of community organizers or community organizer groups credited with getting the miners out of there? Was ACORN down there? I haven’t heard. Was Andy Stern, the SEIU, were they down there? Was there any group of people that voted for Obama, contributed to Obama, anybody in his circle down there to help save the miners? A lot of corporations were listed as helping. I didn’t see any community organizers down there getting the miners out, did you?
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: ‘It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism. … The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly every stop: ‘The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.’ Uh, yeah. That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right. Ask the miners. If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?
‘This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above. … Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection. Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, ‘I never realized that kind of thing actually existed.’ That’s right. In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry. But the reality behind the miracles is the same: Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates, or someone else trumps their innovation. Most of the time, no one notices. All it does is create jobs, wealth and well-being. But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.
‘The miners’ rescue is a thrilling moment for Chile, an imprimatur on its rising status. But I’m thinking of that 74-person outfit in Berlin, Pa., whose high-tech drill bit opened the earth to free them.’ And that’s a huge bit, 21 inches, is huge. ‘You know there are tens of thousands of stories like this in the U.S., as big as Google and small as Center Rock. I’m glad one of them helped save the Chileans. What’s needed now is a new American economic model that lets our innovators rescue the rest of us.’ So Dan Henninger here gets it exactly right as Chris Matthews gets it laughably wrong.