I'm watching this on TV now.
I liked the part where Mark Green pointed his finger at this clown!
Kevin James:
What a maroon!
I got tears...... 
Must go watch now. omfg..... more spontaneous combustable people..... boom! LOLOLOL
Matthews: "We're not getting anywhere here."
NO SHIT! He should have pulled the plug on that manaic 30 seconds in, and it's worth noting when the other side had a (very brief) shot, Matthews let asshole shout right over his few comments.
What a zoo. Who watches this shit?
Poor Kevin, he and the goopers are about to get a war shoved up their asses.
In this case I am glad he let him go on and on and on looking like a total dumb ass.
James needs to take appeaser.
"a blank slate in terms of history"
ouch
The most important question here is...."Who the f is Kevin James????"
LMAO. I googled him and an actor came up. I mean, come on. Matthews is chumming the bottom of the barrel. This was his 15 seconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kev...s_(broadcaster)
People forget there's a reason why Neville Chamberlain attempted to negotiate with Hitler. WWI. Chamberlain was aware of the threat. He wanted to try and prevent another hellish war......... and at the time he was supported by the British public........ the same public that had seen mass slaughter just some 20 years before. Chamberlain and his French counterparts made mistakes, but ultimately, WWII was Hitler's fault.
damm...every once and a while the MSM dose soemthing to reedemm themselves..don't worry this feeling of respect for mathewes will pass.
I find it bizarre how Americans treat Chamberlain and Churchill in such black and white terms. Chamberlain Bad, Churchill Good. A) Both reputations are a lot more ambiguous, with regard to British history, in the UK and B), I've never witnessed the same kind of discussion of pre-war American politics, prior to 1939, in the UK. I guess Chamberlain will always be the eternal whipping boy.
My head hurts. I have to be able to rely on just a few things, okay? World - round. Water - wet. Chris Matthews - dick. Please stop screwing with me, 'kay?
In this case I don't think it is about if chamberlain was good or bad, it was that the GOP trots out this bullshit and they have NO IDEA what the hell they are talking about. NO IDEA
he didn't even know what the word appeasement means.
stupid asshole
Appeasing Genghis Khan was a strategy, Chamberlain misjudged Hitler and led the world into a war. But if you didn't appease the great khan, it was doom on you.
so... just goes to show you... Read a fucking book sometime... 
In this case I don't think it is about if chamberlain was good or bad, it was that the GOP trots out this bullshit and they have NO IDEA what the hell they are talking about. NO IDEA
he didn't even know what the word appeasement means.
No, I agree, just that I'm fed up with the trope that somehow Chamberlain caused WWII all by his little lonesome. Listening to the Reich Wing, you'd think that Hitler had nothing to do with anything.......... he just happened to invade Poland.
Bollox Ref, fair enough.
and not surprising at all.
No, you're right, what I said about Chamberlain in my comment was poorly worded. Hitler led the world into the war.
We tend to think of Chamberlain as the trigger because he held the door for Hitler... Adolf was going in anyway...
People forget that Neville Chamberlain was a conservative (Tory) and he thought that he could do business with Hitler because (he thought) Hitler was at bottom just another conservative. The Liberal and Labour parties in the UK were dead-set against appeasement, but the US conservatives were mostly for it. (Of course, Churchill was a conservative too, but he was on the outs with the Conservative Party in the 30's and the first thing he did when he became PM was to form a national unity government and bring in a bunch of Labour and Liberal people at the top.)
This is also the mind-set by which W's grandfather did business with Hitler, which I wish Obama would bring up in passing the next time W tries this.
By the way, Churchill said "Jaw-jaw is better than war-war," and was not afraid to speak to anyone.
That was excruciating!
Good God; it's the Anti-Gilliard.
This reminded me of the Indiana Jones scene where the giant karate guy does a bunch of wheeling around and Indiana Jones just shoots him.
That Air America guy only got in one line. "When your in a hole stop digging." But he's the only one who looked good, and his line was a knockout. Chris Matthews only got the year right because the guy in his earpiece corrected him, and was also a dick. Fuck Chris Matthews.
Bonus for the repressed, homoerotic "Because you always get me excited, Chris" about 80 seconds in.
BolloxRef,
You forget the part where the Conservative goes home and demonizes the opposition for knowing that Hitler was crazy as fuck and needed to be defeated before imposing mass murder across Europe.
The same "internationals" that were demonized for fighting Hitler and Franco in Spain, while the French and English effectively blockaded Spain and cut off support for the democratically-elected government so Fascists could triumph and Communists could destroy the Spanish revolution at the roots and surrender to the fascists when requested.
Churchill was cut out of the same cloth as most of the other Conservatives except with the one redeeming quality of siding with his country instead of his class outlook...at least for a time. Other than that he was a terrible military strategist responsible for the most boneheaded moves in TWO wars(Gallipoli and the invasion of Italy). And oh yeah British voters kicked him out pretty soon as the war was over and he wanted to go back to business as usual.
Churchill's image over the past decade or so seems to be getting the Reagan treatment. Churchill might be more worthy of praise than St. Ronnie, but I doubt he is worth half as much as he is given credit for.
Don't get me started about the truth behind Mark Green, and how he has sanitized Air America to GOP talking points lite.
Air America is no longer a voice for progressive ideals. Not by a . . . a . . . lot.
They are shills for big money, nothing else.
Tweety's humps? I had my say on the thread above. Great work, but fuck him for his past.
Good news folks? Tide's turning HARD, and fast.
Faster than i dreamed it ever would.
I hate to admit, Tanbark said it would, at this point, a few years ago.
I'm still not FULLY convinced we're on the loose, but, man, this past 72 hours IS heady.
Harumph.
I tried weiging in with this on C&L, but the post limit had been exceeded.
Firstly Chamberlain did *not* 'hold the door open' for Hitler, the Munich Accords allowed him the Sudetenland only, which was not as Matthews implied "half of Czechoslovakia", but a small segment of land which extended the border of Germany into Czechoslovakia by 20 miles or so, which was apparently largely populated by Germans.
Let me just make clear that I'm not saying it was right to have ceded that land, but the UK needed every extra minute that could be squeezed out of the run-up to hostilities, and Chamberlain successfully bought that time.
He'd also pursued a policy of rationalisation, with the British government buying abandoned factories and rebuilding them in time to ramp up production for the war. The fact that we had factories to build armaments, vehicles and aircraft in by 1938 was largely thanks to him.
Also, I think that the overly simplistic view of early 20th century history fails to take into account just why most of the European nations were sick of war. WWI to the US was effectively a 19 month skirmish, but the Great War to Europe was a far heavier affair - an entire generation of young men fed into a meatgrinder that made Vietnam look like a border skirmish by comparison. Generals schooled on Napoleonic tactics marching lines of teenage boys into walls of machine gun fire and shells. Some villages and towns literally had no healthy young men left by the time the Armistice was signed. *That* is why the people did not want another war if it could possibly be helped.
The Warsaw Ghetto wasn't until 2 years after the Munich Conference, the Final Solution was not put forward until over a year after that, well into the war. No-one believed that Hitler would go as far as he did and to judge the actions of politicians in 1938 with that kind of hindsight is to do them a great disservice.
Finally - Chamberlain did not see Hitler as a 'fellow Conservative', and it just goes to show how far the Thatcher/Reaganites have debased the term. Hitler was a right-wing radical in every sense of the word and by all accounts Chamberlain disliked him intensely.
J.
Churchill might be more worthy of praise than St. Ronnie, but I doubt he is worth half as much as he is given credit for.
Well, I can't picture Reagan ever winning a Nobel Prize for literature...
Churchill was an excellent war leader, but his talents beyond war leadership and as a personable raconteur were mediocre. He did a sterling job during the war years and no-one can take that away from him.
However, his second premiership from 1951 to 1955 (his resignation due to ill health) was a more turbulent time and would have been a salutary lesson to President Junior had he bothered to learn it. As the old British Empire faded, independence movements sprung up all over the former colonies and Churchill advocated military action to quell them. He won the military conflict in Malaya, but it quickly became apparent that Britain could no longer afford to run it as a colony.
Malaya acheived independence in 1957.
Food for thought, ain't it?
As with so many things, the wingnuts confuse motivation with execution. Chamberlain's motivations for negotiating were mixed (holding off The Great War pt. 2, but also trying to preserve a status quo that had vanished forever 25 years earlier) and up for debate. His execution, on the other hand, stunk on ice. Chamberlain grossly misassessed his negotiating partner (in terms of both personality and resources) and then gave into his bullying demands. There's nothing wrong with going rope-a-dope in an on-going negotiation, but at a certain point you have to show your opponent that you've had enough, and hammer back hard. Chamberlain, still playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules against the likes of Mike Tyson, not only wasn't built that way, but couldn't even project the image that he was.
All that being said, Chamberlain comes off a lot better compared to the American true-believer Isolationists of the time with their peasant delusions, and compared to proto-globalists like Prescott Bush who got right into bed with the thugs and bullies as long as they were corporate friendly. If there had been neoconservatives at the time, they'd have dithered until Pearl Harbor, and then attacked and occupied Salazar's Portugal ("The olive oil will pay for the war!").
Even a broken clock is right twice, still hate Chris
Chamberlin also has a bad rap in the UK, but hey at least he was not executed like the French did to the WWI heroe Petain. Also I was very sure that Chamberlin was a labour PM.
Also I was very sure that Chamberlin was a labour PM.
You were mistaken. Chamberlain was a member of the Conservative Party.
Chris Matthews smells blood in the water--his own. This is just an attempt to come off as a real journalist after the heavy criticism he has been receiving from all sides for his substandard, useless interview style.
Corporate news management may be venal but not entirely stupid. Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams are increasing their viewership while others such as Matthews are losing theirs. Since it's all about revenue, corporatists are more than willing to let Matthew pretend he's developed some courage as long as he brings in viewers for what's really important--the commercials.
Chris Matthews smells blood in the water--his own. This is just an attempt to come off as a real journalist after the heavy criticism he has been receiving from all sides for his substandard, useless interview style.
His MSNBC contract expires in June 2009. And Rachel Maddow waits in the wings.
Hitler shouldn't even have won. The Western Allies in 1940 had a better quantity and quality of tanks than the Germans, but the Allied generals, for the most part, did not know how to use them properly. France did not suffer a deficiency of valor among its soldiers; it suffered a deficiency of intelligence among its generals.
Chamberlain was an old-school Conservative (Tory) politician. Churchill was also a Tory, but drew most of his pro-intervention support from the Labour and Liberal benches in the lead-up to war. I bet that's another one the wingnut "history" buffs don't know.
Chamberlin, however, is the drummer in the Smashing Pumpkins. 
IBW : The Nazis were bluffing about their military strength. Chamberlain did not know that. What he did know was that the RAF (Britain's primary defence, as they didn't want to risk the Home Fleet yet) was still equipped primarily with biplanes - 1920s technology.
You have to give it to Chamberlain though, once he knew he'd been had, he fought tirelessly to get our economy onto a stable war footing as quickly as possible, yet within 6 months of retiring from the premiership he had died of cancer. Churchill's eulogy was telling.
"Also I was very sure that Chamberlin was a labour PM."
You might be confusing him with that other weak-kneed appeaser of bullies, Tony Blair.
"Chris Matthews smells blood in the water--his own."
That body of water being the Potomac, which more Americans realize is rife with the fetid stench of smug Beltway establishment "insiders" like Tweety. I don't care how many points like this he scores, he lost credibility a long time ago.
You know, I was in a rush this AM--had a meeting to run and one of my favorite pairs of Fluevogs (the now-discontinued unisex "Blaze Ruboffs") needed to be taken to the cobbler for major stitch repairs. However, I gave myself 5 to read before work, and man, I almost pissed on my cheap Ikea computer stool laughing.
The sad thing is the meeting that I wound up running went almost exactly the same--a young, stupid, know-it-all kept trying to talk know-nothing shit over me.
Unlike this moron though, I am now having the pleasure of asking him for backup emails and materials...heh...
Obama Til Denver, agreed. But Clueless Matthews is just now getting A Round Tuit, since he lost his intelligence along with his credibility a long time ago.
"The sad thing is the meeting that I wound up running went almost exactly the same--a young, stupid, know-it-all kept trying to talk know-nothing shit over me."
Well, after having such a busy morning you needed something to eat for breakfast.
tenacitus: Petain was a Nazi collaborator. He got what he deserved.
Jen, as a woman of a certain age, when I get into heated discussions with my peers, they become very distraught when I ask that they back up their opinions with facts that they should be able to google from any laptop at whoever's house we're at. I can understand that some of my friends aren't used to thinking that they may have to back their ignorant ideas instantaneously, it's not something that's ever been required for most of their lives.
I find it interesting that your young know-it-all colleague seemed to think he could get away with the same shite. Keep us informed as to what he ends up doing--I'd just love to know.
jen, busness guy right..pre or post MBA labatomy...the best part of my job is getting to call gusy like that falmeign mroeons, in large meetings, with their peers and bosses...i realy like it when they try and dispute my findings, then i get to do the data dump, to prove beyond a shdow ofa doubt that they are compleatly incompitiant.
good tiems, good times.
moonglum, I love you. Please correct your spelling.
LCforevah
"they become very distraught when I ask that they back up their opinions with facts that they should be able to google from any laptop at whoever's house we're at."
If anyone has to Google something up during one of my meetings to support their case, they've already lost the debate. Google is for the guy running the meeting, and for follow-up. If someone doesn't show up prepared to discuss agenda items (especially his own), he's wasting everyone's time and doesn't belong in the room. I'm not afraid to let him know it, either: first time, stern private warning; second time, gentle public teasing; third time ... never been a third time.
The good news is, my meetings run short and tight, and everyone gets back to doing real work (or going home) sooner. It takes a little extra time for the MBAs to get used to the concept of a meeting that doesn't exist soley to showcase their brilliant rhetoric, but eventually the ones who don't rely on BS learn to love it.
Obama Til D, I was referring to more social situations where people begin to blather out things for emotional reasons, never expecting to be called on them. It took me years to understand that a lot of social conversations are not really conversations at all, but opportunities to speak in code and see who around you is in the in group or the out group.
By being the one demanding facts, I usually put the kibosh on the high school style communications, and rightly piss people off who wanted to do nothing but repeat republican talking points.
Glad to know that in your professional communications you don't let anyone get away with the stoopid.
"Obama Til D, I was referring to more social situations where people begin to blather out things for emotional reasons, never expecting to be called on them."
Sorry, thought you were referring to a meeting situation like Jen's. I tend to go much easier on people in social circumstances, but if someone I dislike tries to get made-up shit past me like I'm a a moron TV host, I'll happily bury them with some reality-based Google-Fu.
OTD - The good news is, my meetings run short and tight, and everyone gets back to doing real work (or going home) sooner. It takes a little extra time for the MBAs to get used to the concept of a meeting that doesn't exist soley to showcase their brilliant rhetoric, but eventually the ones who don't rely on BS learn to love it.
Well, AMEN to that!
Well, this was such a cut and dried case that I can't believe he was challenging me. Of course, when I asked him for emails and specific work-examples to prove that he had done things a said way (which goes against our internal guidelines) in the past, he hemmed and hawed and melted away.
Sure enough though I'm the one who got a talking to for not "presenting a united front" from the boss. Yes, this is the same twit I've been complaining about for a year. Figures.
Reality-based Google-Fu !! I'll use that phrase next time and see where it gets me.
"Sure enough though I'm the one who got a talking to for not "presenting a united front" from the boss. Yes, this is the same twit I've been complaining about for a year. Figures."
Ah, the whiney old "you're not being a team player" BS. The lame last resort of HR departments and managers everywhere who fear and hate the idea of real collaborative work. The statement might better issue from the speaker's anus as a weak fart for all the real meaning it carries.
That truly sucks, Jen, but it makes me feel better about my decision not to work directly for a BigCorp ever again.
hey jen want to join me in an MBA killing spree.
see my psot in the open thread....
Pierre Laval was shot. They let Petain go off and die quietly.
LCForevah, that type of conversation is called "phatic," where the content is a distant second to establishing relative social positions, intent, disposition, etc.
If you're in highschool and the conversation turns to ski vacations, that's a phatic conversation. Weeds out the poor kids.
Goddam that Kevin James is a pipsqueak.
And doesn't Obama or *anyone near a mike* mention that the appeasing Senator was the republican William E. Borah?
AAAAAAAAAaahhhh bjacques! After all these years, I finally know I'm not insane! There's actually a word for that shite!
I suppose the next time I find myself in a political conversation where people are trying to find out where I stand as opposed to determining my grasp of facts, I will be far happier when I "ruin the mood" with my critical thinking skills. Heh.
Give Kev a break. He's just trying to take Doug's title away.
LCforevah:
"Glad to know that in your professional communications you don't let anyone get away with the stoopid"
Watch it buddy...
Bjacques,
Thank you for the new word--will use it much!
Yer welcome. But I just did some Google-fu to make sure, and I think I made it sound more negative than it really is. I got it mostly right, but a better definition is small talk that opens the way to deeper communication (or at least determines whether that is possible), but sounding someone out can qualify. And among Republicans with a siege mentality, small talk can be a racist or sexist joke to see if you're someone with whom they can "speak freely" and not a "PC liberal."
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