So, by now, nearly every news outlet has reported on the Imus racial slur / comment: AP (Via Yahoo!), MSNBC, ABC NEWS, Faux News, CBS NEWS, Sports Illustrated, CNN, Google News (which lists 1016 articles on this story), Some other sources that you can find on Google News that prominently address this story:

Yep, John McCain, not content to become Bush's third Term, has decided to make his campaign all about him being the next Dick Cheney.

From Fortune Magazine
, via
Media Matters we get the first atrocity.

Read below, if you dare.

In a recent The Atlantic blog post, blogger Matt Yglesias inexplicably writes he "100% agrees with" a Jonah Goldberg recommendation to turn Meet The Press into a panel-show hosted by Chuck Todd.

A Matt Yglesias commenter (in a comment typical of those on the thread) writes: "I think Chuck Todd would be a great choice. Cerebral, likeable, not overtly ideological, not a blowhard, projects competence."

But Chuck Todd is a typical corporate media shill who uses his position in the mainstream-media to trim the facts presented to the public and to promote Republicans!

I have been thinking about this for some time regarding a Meet the Press appearance by Newt Gingrich from December 17, 2006.  At the time, I was paying only mild attention, as I was busy grading final exams.  However, you know how it is when you hear something that just catches you and won't let go.  So, this morning I pulled down the transcript, and what I was hearing indeed did happen.  Fortunately, it appears on a single page.

The Newt & Whomever Show

Summary: The following is an add-on to Indyslip's diary about the NY Post printing Keith Olbermann's address over a story about him and his taxes.

Basically, I want to give a little background on the website that started this mess, Olbermannwatch.

Fox News contributor David Horowitz visited UC Santa Cruz to explain how  conservative viewpoints are not represented in an academic setting. You may remember that Horowitz has called UC Santa Cruz the worst school in the country, based on his conversations with five students. I am serious, he only talked to five students. Though many students were forced to watch David Horowitz's speech from outside of the auditorium, that did not stop Horowitz from making fun of the people outside. We heard later that he called us "racist bigots". One person on the outside held up a sign saying "Kill Whitey" which most of the others outside, including myself, opposed. Ironically, it was written by the same guy who disrupted Horowitz's presentation. There is one funny segment in the clip At 1:38 and 1:52 into the clip, as Horowitz pops a snot bubble. Send this clip to Media Matters if you think it is deserving of being shown.

[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]

Watch the evening news on television.  I started casually stating this to my friends and family soon after Kerry was defeated and found the results extremely interesting, a remarkably consistent bland acceptance of the fact, perhaps a few small nods, followed by a long polite silence that always produced a change of subject.  Been reading too much Chomsky—something like that—was always the inevitable silent response.

ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS Newshour, MSNBC and FOX are propaganda broadcasters for corporate America.  This true statement also produces an inevitable polite silence to be followed yet again by a change in subject, for many reasons most Americans simply will not believe that Almighty America would produce such a sewer of childish lying and culpability, such a phenomena could only exist in fiction.  Been reading too much Orwell, they silently intone, and move on.

Amidst the uproar over George Bush politicizing the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence, the media has been strangely silent about the revelation that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, by George Bush and John McCain's own definition, is guilty of "foolish delusion," and lacks "the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation's security."  

Just one day before Bush declared that "some," also known as Barack Obama, is an appeaser to terrorists, the likes of which have not been seen since Hitler invaded Poland, and before John McCain chimed in by saying Obama wanted to enhance "the prestige of a nation that's a sponsor of terrorists and is directly responsible for the deaths of brave young Americans," Robert Gates said:

We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them. If there's going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can't go to a discussion and be completely the demander with them not feeling that they need anything from us.

And while there has been plenty of coverage of Bush's remarks, McCain's parroting of Bush's remarks and Obama's smackdown of both of them, no one seems to be covering Gates' policy of terrorist-enabling appeasement.  Or as Jamison Foser at Media Matters put it:

Naturally, then, a media firestorm erupted, with the Bush administration and its political allies questioned all day about whether Bush has any idea what he is talking about, whether he has lost control over the Pentagon, whether Gates will be fired, what Gates thinks about Bush's comparison of those (like Gates) who advocate dialogue between the United States and Iran to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, and whether the fiasco will remind voters that the Bush administration's foreign policy has been marked by incompetence and dishonesty, thus doing irreparable electoral damage to John McCain and other Republican candidates.

Sorry -- what was I thinking? That didn't happen.

Foser points out that ABC, CBS, the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Time and ABC's The Note, have all extensively covered the "appeasement controversy," but have made no mention of Gates' comments.  Given that Dana Perino claimed that Bush's remarks simply reflected "long-established United States policy," why is the fact that Bush's own Secretary of Defense opposes this policy not news?  

Twenty-four days of silence and still counting.

On Sunday, April 20, The New York Times published David Barstow's article on the propaganda conduit the Pentagon had built for itself to television, radio and cable channels, turning retired military-cum-media-analysts "into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air."

Since then, as a number of bloggers have repeatedly noted, almost zero coverage about Barstow's story has appeared on the television and radio networks and cable stations where these analysts have appeared. Not even 30 seconds in most cases.

That's high contrast with how many times the analysts themselves have appeared.

Media Matters, which has been doing an excellent job of hammering on this story, has conducted a review which found that since January 1, 2002:

...the analysts named in Barstow's article collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR in segments covering the Iraq war both before and after the invasion, as well as numerous other national security or government policy issues. ...

Media Matters used the Nexis database to tabulate appearances by [20] analysts on networks with which they were affiliated that included discussions of issues related to national security or U.S. government policy. Instances in which analysts appeared on networks other than those with which they were affiliated were not counted. (My emphasis - MB)

For instance, Thomas G. McInerney, a terrorist-promoting retired lieutenant general, appeared on Fox News 144 times. Retired Brigadier Gen. David L. Grange analyzed for CNN and CNN Headline News 921 times. Retired Major Gen. Wayne A. Downing analyzed 270 times for NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.

A spreadsheet listing each of the analysts' appearances is available at the Media Matters' link above.

Someone else who has been doing a fine job of dogging the military analyst story since it broke is Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. He is one of those rummaging around in the document dump of 8000 pages and audiotapes that the Pentagon was forced to provide The New York Times.

Greenwald's latest piece, on Tuesday, asked, Was Karl Rove involved in the military analyst program?:

I have no idea whether the "Karl" with whom they had weekly briefings and were planning to brief on the military analyst Iraq trip is Karl Rove. I asked Larry Di Rita by email about this exchange and specifically whether Rove was ever briefed on the program, and he has not replied.

In the documents I reviewed, I haven't seen any other "Karl" referenced who works at the DoD. These are fairly high-ranking DoD officials and there aren't many people they're worried about having to explain themselves to (Smith's position as Assistant Defense Secretary was one requiring Senate confirmation and he reported to Rumsfeld). Given the significant possibility that this program was illegal, and given Perino's denial of the White House's knowledge of it, this question -- whether the "karl" being briefed on the program was Karl Rove -- certainly seems to be one that should be asked.

UPDATE: I think it's fair to call this "confirmation" that Rove was involved in the military analysts program. First, a March 16, 2006 email from Dallas Lawrence (6548), referencing a briefing of military analysts -- which, he wrote, was "a closed call opened only to our retired military analysts" in order "to get them on message heading into the weekend on Iraqi troop strength, advances, etc."

Some bloggers have wondered why anybody should make such a big deal of this story. After all, we've known for years that  government propagandists exaggerated, distorted and lied about the Iraq war before it started and have continued to do so as the occupation has dragged on and on. So nobody should be shocked that this Pentagon project occurred. Moreover, it is said, this is nothing new in U.S. history.

That misses the point. Yes, our government did not begin engaging in this kind of media-mediated propaganda on September 12, 2001. Starting in the 1950s, for instance, the CIA eventually put together a cohort of 400 American journalists at highly respected newspapers that it could count on to provide information about countries they visited and leaders they talked to as well as to get story angles the agency wanted published into print.

This latest domestic propaganda project is no surprise, and only a shock to the naive. But just because it's not surprising doesn't make it any less outrageous. And those who are digging out the details of what went on, how the project came about, who thought it up and carried it out, deserve our kudos for their efforts just as the media who operated as conduits for this propaganda deserve our jeers for failing to vet these experts in the first place and for keeping silent about them now.

+++

The Overnight News Digest is posted.    

Twenty days ago, David Barstow broke his story in The New York Times about the Pentagon’s use of network and cable military analysts to reinforce its talking points and present a favorable picture of happenings in Iraq. Ever since, the print and television media have delved into the scandal, prying out new details in interviews and document searches, and discussing the implications for democracy when the Department of Defense shapes the debate with the help of triple-dipping former employees who present themselves as objective observers of U.S. policy.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight. In some parallel dimension.

In our dimension, what we’ve got isn’t a flurry of follow-up reports but rather one of the key elements of propaganda: killing a story by ignoring it.

The media typically employ their pervasive power to reinforce the dominant ideology through repeated exposure to every element of their biased agenda. But silence should not be underrated. It provides a marvelous tool of control when accompanied by the never-ending distractions and distortions of infotainment.

No surprise whatsoever that the network and cable stations who hired these ex-military analysts without disclosing to audiences their conflicts of interest or other biases have been – let us be generous – reluctant to acknowledge their role in passing along exaggerations and outright lies to Americans in the run-up to the war and its bloody, treasury-sucking aftermath. They have a big stake in silence.

On the other hand, it might be thought that editorialists of major print outlets which didn't pay for the free-lance "expertise" of the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda brigade would be eager to write something excoriating. Or that print reporters would be digging into the documents on the subject that the Pentagon has dumped at this Web site. Alas, such modest aggressiveness is also confined to that other dimension.

Just how silent the media have been has been examined by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (TV News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits) and the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism (Media Passes on Times Pentagon Piece). In the first week after Barstow’s story appeared, Pew found two stories about it in other media, both of them on PBS. Since then, there have been a handful of others.

Only in wwwLand and among a few in Congress has the story been given any significant attention. Senator John Kerry urged a "thorough investigation" by the Government Accountability Office, as he noted here at Daily Kos in Investigate the Pentagon Pundit Program. Senator Russ Feingold also wrote the GAO. Michigan Senator Carl Levin has written to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro wrote to news executives at the broadcast and cable networks asking them to explain what criteria they use for hiring military analysts. Only ABC and CNN responded. She and 40 other congresspersons have asked the Pentagon’s Inspector General to conduct a probe. She joined with Michigan Rep. John Dingell and others requesting the Federal Communications Commission look into the matter:

"While we deem the DoD’s policy unethical and perhaps illegal, we also question whether the analysts and the networks are potentially equally culpable pursuant to the sponsorship identification requirements in the Communications Act of 1934 and the rules of the Federal Communications Commission," the letter stated.

"When seemingly objective television commentators are in fact highly motivated to promote the agenda of a government agency, a gross violation of the public trust occurs," it continued. "The American people should never be subject to a covert propaganda campaign but rather should be clearly notified of who is sponsoring what they are watching."

About all this too, megamedia silence.

It’s not as if there hasn’t been anything fresh to report. Media Matters, which has followed the story since it broke, actually spent some time perusing those documents the Pentagon posted. For those who claim there was nothing nefarious about the domestic propaganda program, that it was merely a program of courtesy briefings to ensure that the military analysts were up to speed on what was really happening with regards to Iraq, Media Matters found this audio-taped exchange of ass-kissing and subversion from an April 18, 2006, Pentagon meeting with several analysts, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and General Peter Pace, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

UNIDENTIFIED 1: I'm an old intel guy, and I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. And that is "psyops." Now, most people, when they hear that, they think, "Oh my God --

RUMSFELD: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: -- "they're trying to brainwash [inaudible]."

RUMSFELD: "What are you, some kind of nut? You don't believe in the Constitution?"

UNIDENTIFIED 2: Well, he is.
[laughter]

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Some have characterized [inaudible]. But I would also disagree with you, sir, respectfully. You are absolutely brilliant in front of the camera. And anybody --

RUMSFELD: It's by acting. Because I don't spend any time --

UNIDENTIFIED 1: It doesn't matter. The point is that you are. And I think most of us would agree with that. And --

RUMSFELD: But I -- but -- but --

UNIDENTIFIED 1: -- to take the offensive is -- because many of us go on every day. We don't agree with everything the administration does, maybe with some of your decisions and -- but we get beat up on television sometimes when we go on and we are debating, and then we take the -- and we're all thick-skinned, or we wouldn't continue to do this.

RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: But we would love -- I would personally love -- and I think I speak for most of the gentlemen here at the table -- for you to take the offensive, to just go out there and just crush these people so that when we go on, we're -- forgive me -- we're parroting, but it's what has to be said. It's what we believe in, or we would not be saying it.
[crosstalk]

UNIDENTIFIED 1: And we'd love to be following our leader, as indeed you are. You are the leader. You are our guy.

The Pentagon wouldn’t say who those unidentifieds were, but it gave Media Matters a list of confirmed participants at the meeting. Among them were Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, military analyst for Fox News who recently suggested using terrorism against Iran.

On Wednesday at its Web site, Media Matters asked the media: "Have you hosted on air the person who told Rumsfeld at the  meeting with military analysts: 'You are the leader. You are our guy'?

In that other dimension, they might have gotten an answer. But in that dimension, they wouldn't have had to ask the question.

+ + +

^{Glenn Greenwald has written an excellent piece based on the documents on the Pentagon Web site.}

One of many questions that Chris Wallace failed to ask Barack Obama during his 45-minute interview on Foxaganda Sunday was what the Senator thought about David Barstow’s devastating exposé in The New York Times the previous weekend.

No surprise. What would be the percentage in replacing one of the plethora of Jeremiah Wright questions with an inquiry about the megamedia’s hiring of retired military officers who sexed up the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and then exaggerated, distorted and lied about what was happening when the war and subsequent occupation got underway? Would that help the bottom line? Nah. Hence, none of Wallace’s pals at Foxaganda are talking about this. Indeed, mum’s been the word on Barstow’s bombshell throughout the megamedia. The talking point – or perhaps the memo from on high – seems to be: Don’t talk.

Don’t tell viewers that retired generals and colonels and majors engaged in a war-drumming, flag-waving perversion of patriotism. Or that those in the Pentagon who ordered special briefings for these analysts as part of a domestic propaganda campaign ought to get their mail deliveries slipped between the bars at Leavenworth for the next few years. Avoid the subject and maybe it will go away like so many other stories which have been disappeared as if they were dissidents in some backwater military dictatorship.

No news coverage, no commentary, no questions for any candidates. No abject apologies to viewers from station CEOs who paid double-dippers and triple-dippers to give an official patina to fabrications that have caused the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans and other coalition soldiers. Plus millions of Iraqis. Business as usual. Even two days after the Pentagon suspended the briefings last Friday, Foxaganda was still employing retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney without disclosure.

You want to know more about the story, you go to Barstow’s follow-ups, to those of Glenn Greenwald at Salon, to the folks at Media Matters, and to excellent work of Ari Melber at The Nation. As a matter of fact, if you’d like to see Senator Obama’s answer to that question Wallace should have asked, you can find it (and Senator Clinton’s answer, too) at Melber’s blog here.

We’ve arrived at this situation because of three sets of cowards.

First among these are the military analysts themselves, supposedly men of courage who donned the uniform of the United States and swore an oath to uphold its Constitution. As Barstow wrote:

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

Tell the truth on the teevee and say poof! to that lucrative retainer, that seat on the board of some major player in the military-industrial complex, that ability to get the Pentagon to assign a favorable contract to the guys who are filling your bank account. What would retirement be like with a lowered cash flow? Yikes! Can't have that. So, instead of calling government policy into question, instead of acting like an officer and a gentleman, sell the country out and keep the moolah flowing. Spit on the men and women sent to fight. Spit on the Constitution. Spit on the truth. Once, they painted a yellow stripe down the back of cowardly soldiers.

Not merely cowards. As Daily Kos Contributing Editor BarbinMD wrote when this story was new:  "These men willingly deceived the American public to protect their access to power and more importantly, their profits. Perhaps traitor doesn't even begin to describe them." Indeed.

The second set of cowards are all those well-coifed news-readers and commentators and interviewers at CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN and Foxaganda who’ve not seen fit to discuss The New York Times story except to briefly note that the Pentagon has stopped giving the briefings.

We know why Bill O’Reilly hasn’t stepped up with a mea culpa. On April 14, less than a week before Barstow’s piece appeared, according to Media Matters:

During the April 14 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O'Reilly declared: "I can't base my opinion" about the Iraq war "on anything" other than "what my military analysts, people paid by Fox News, say to me." O'Reilly added that he could trust only Fox military analysts because "[t]he newspapers ... all have an agenda" and "only give you a snapshot of the war." Later in the broadcast, O'Reilly reiterated his position, saying, "I have to base my analysis on what our Fox News military analysts, who I think are the best and always [have] been the best, are saying." Further, O'Reilly described as "ridiculous" a caller's efforts to base his view of the war by "reading the Internet and the newspapers and forming a definitive opinion [based] upon what they say."

No retraction since. No mention at all. Silence from him and his colleagues throughout the industry – how appropriate that word. They didn’t vet the analysts or check out their possible agendas the way any good journalist would do. They ignored sources that might have called into question the claims of Lt. General Disinformation. Couldn’t find the wherewithal to let viewers know that Major Mendacious worked for a military contractor with a stake in the occupation of Iraq. Just broadcast his lies and cut his checks.

Of course, pointing out the cowardice of the megamedia’s on-camera crowd is thoroughly redundant. As Greenwald wrote Monday after a little praise for the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz – one of the few print journalists of note to say anything about Barstow’s revelations:

Kurtz's specific criticism of the media's behavior regarding this story highlights a broader and even more important point. In general, the establishment media almost completely excludes critiques of their own behavior, and discussions of the role the media plays in bolstering deceitful narratives is missing almost entirely from media-controlled discourse.

One of the most significant political stories of this decade, if not this generation -- the media's full-scale complicity with the Government in the run-up to the Iraq war -- has never been meaningfully discussed or examined on any establishment television network, including cable shows. While piecemeal quibbles of media coverage can be heard (of the type Kurtz typically spouts, or the Limbaugh-driven complaint about the "liberal media"), no fundamental critique of the role the media plays, the influence of its corporate ownership, its incestuous relationship with and dependence on government power -- among the most influential factors driving our political life -- are ever heard.

And we’re not likely to because of the third group of cowards. The guys who actually own and run the channels who paid the military shills to present the Cheney-Bush administration’s Iraq case for the past six years. Indeed, as Media Matters noted, they refused to appear on PBS last Thursday when the public channel took its look into the role of the military analysts.

In the old days in Japan, so the story goes, bosses who engaged in illegal, destructive or merely shameful behavior made a deep bow to those they had offended and headed off to a private room for a date with the blade of a tanto.

Even for those who’ve betrayed their fellow citizens and helped deliver thousands to their deaths for profit, seppuku’s admittedly a bit harsh. But if the craven news chiefs and channel owners were the least bit honest and upstanding, they’d be setting aside 15 or 20 minutes of broadcast time to apologize to the American people for acting as propagandists, for their malicious, intentional, long-running disinformation campaign. And they’d end with an on-the-air resignation and a vow never again to head up a media operation.

But then, if they were honest and upstanding, they wouldn’t be who they are. And we wouldn’t be where we are, mired in Iraq with no end in sight.

A hundred years of scrubbing will not remove the blood from their hands.

(crossposted from Cobalt6)

This is what Larry Sabato thinks of you. This is the level he thinks you operate on.

During the March 25 edition of Fox News' Your World With Neil Cavuto, Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, asserted: "Look, when you analyze parties, you need to think of them this way: The Democratic Party is the mommy party, and the Republican Party is the daddy party" -- recycling a standard gender cliché frequently used by the media to discuss Republicans and Democrats.

More below the diaper fold.

Remember the movie "Network?"  I think a lot of us are having "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" moments, especially lately. The Mainstream Media Managed News Week in Review would read something like this:

1. America discovers that Barack Obama is a black man and we decide to embrace worrying about it.

2. America learns that Hillary Clinton cannot win the nomination in any fair way but we applaud her scrappy efforts to subvert the democratic process because we like her fighting spirit!

3. America is told that the Bush regime intends to "stay the course" in its fiasco in Iraq and we ignore the facts on the ground so that we can delude ourselves that somehow it's all going to work.

4. America sees a suggestion that John McCain doesn't know his arse from a hole in the ground about places where he wants to fight wars but he's a maverick so it's ok.

We need a concert of complaint to the Media to stop this nonsense!

Good morning everyone, I am new to Daily Kos, wrote a couple of diaries, and I am not the most computer literate person in the world, but I try.

Last Wednesday night, I watched Sean Hannity.  Yes, I watch him sometimes, because I like to see how they will spin a story, so please forgive me.  I thought they were going to talk about Geraldine Ferraro.  Low and behold, this is where and the night, the Reverend Wright story was launched, like a rocket going to the moon.  I know, we should have knowm it was from Fox.  The next day the story was on every major news outlet, playing the videos over and over again.

I am asking all of you to start a movement against Fox.  Moveon.org has a petition on line to quit attacking Obama.  There is a video, the you can sign the petition.   Here is the website:
https://pol.moveon.org/...

Obama denounces Wright's statements:

On Friday, Mr. Obama called a grab bag of statements by his longtime minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., "inflammatory and appalling."

"I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue," he wrote in a campaign statement that was his strongest in a series of public disavowals of his pastor’s views over the past year.

Earlier in the week, several television stations played clips in which Mr. Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, referred to the United States as the "U.S. of K.K.K. A." and said the Sept. 11 attacks were a result of corrupt American foreign policy.

Last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews addressed the firestorm sparked by his comment that "the reason [Hillary Clinton is] a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit."

He addressed the controversy after more than a week of intense pressure from Media Matters, several major national women’s organizations, and thousands of people just like you.

Seems like Chris Matthews got the message.  He kicked off Hardball with a long, long, long-winded apology/affirmation of his "good heart."  Wait, what?

Sen. Hillary Clinton: "I don’t know what to do with men who are obsessed with me. I honestly have never understood it."

[...]

Chris Matthews: "It’s not obsession."

If you have ever watched an episode of Hardball on MSNBC, you may find Chris Matthews’ above statement a bit suspect...