Chris Matthews: Sometimes even a blind pig can find an acorn

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Chris Matthews prides himself on his Philly roots and his hard-headed, common-sense outlook. He likes to think he connects with the cab-driver, the union carpenter, the parish priest, the single mom, and so forth. In other words, the constituency that once belonged to the Democrats. Jack Kennedy is his political father. And like Joe Lieberman, Matthews has been on a long, strange trip over the last decade or so.

As with Lieberman, I don't agree with Chris Matthews much any more. In the months leading up to the beginning of the Iraq war, he was very strongly anti-war, imploring Congressional Democrats to do the same. Essentially, he and Phil Donahue were of the same opinion: the coming was going to be a disaster. Of course, since then, Donahue is gone from MSNBC and Matthews has emerged as one of Bush's loudest cheerleaders. Maybe Matthews saw what happened to Donahue's show (highest rated on MSNBC at the time, BTW). Maybe he changed course to save his broadcast career. Maybe he wants people to forget that he used to work for Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill. Whatever. I don't care because he seems to have parked himself on George Bush's lap permanently.

Woof woof! Who's a good boy, Chris, there's a good boy!

But occasionally, very occasionally, he can still knock one out of the park.

Chris Matthews:

Two years ago, King Abdullah of Jordan warned me of what was coming in the Mideast. His prediction was dead on. He spoke of his fears and what the United States was doing in Iraq, toppling one government, electing another, was creating what he called a Shi'a crescent, from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut that threatened to dominate the Arab world, challenging modern Sunni governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others with an axis of Shi'a power based in Iran.

When I look at the map today, that Shi'a crescent the King foretold has come to light. It is hard for us westerners to understand the internal politics of another region when we can't predict whether the Democrats will take Congress from the Republicans three months from now. How could we see the Shi'a grabbing the high ground from the Sunni in the Mideast three years ago? That's what happened. We converted Iraq from a country which has fought revolutionary Iran for eight years to a bloody standstill to a Shi'a-dominated ally of Iran and created a boulevard of common religion and common regional politics.

Pretty strong stuff. Where was this Chris Matthews during the last two years?

But wait there's more:

Did you hear the new Iraqi leader take sides with Hezbollah in a struggle with Israel? This is the emerging threat, not just to the moderate Sunni countries including Egypt and Jordan, who formed and honored treaties to Israel and us.

Our brave soldiers have fought, died and been dismembered in Iraq only to connect the disparate pieces of Shi'a radicalism into a Frankenstein's monster that has come to life right there on our TV screens and worse yet, in the vicarious Mideast where young Arabs found a hero named Hezbollah...

My point exactly.