Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Digby Watches Rick Hertzberg Jump the Shark in an Impressive Way, for Its Kind: Basically, Hertzberg says that Chris Matthews is a great American because... because... because... it's not clear why, other than that Chris Matthews was good to Rick Hertzberg when Rick Hertzberg was young. Digby: "The Villagers Defend The Perimeter: There are times lately when I feel as if I'm back in 2003. I'm being told that up is down and black is white and that what i'm seeing just isn't real. It's actually much more disorienting than it was then because this time it's coming from the left side of the dial. For instance: 'I have more reasons than most to love Chris Matthews....
 
"'It’s my impression, subjective and biased by friendship though it may be, that, certainly in the past five years or so, Matthews has been considerably tougher on the right than on the left. He was fierce on the Swift Boat slanderers. And on the war he has been magnificent...' The fact that he voted for Bush notwithstanding, of course. And yes, on the war, he certainly has been magnificent... chief among the cheerleaders when Bush delivered a nationally televised speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, in which he declared that '[m]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended', all the while standing under a banner reading: 'Mission Accomplished'.
 
"Despite lingering questions over the continued violence in Iraq, the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, and the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, Matthews fawned over Bush: 'He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. ... He looks for real. ... [H]e didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.... We're proud of our president.... Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president...'
 
"Hertzberg ends his column with this: 'Chris Matthews is a net plus for American politics and American society. If he decides to pack it in and run for office, I plan to max out.' You know, I hear a lot about the need for change in our politics... I hear a lot of it from allegedly liberal pundits like Hertzberg and Matthews who, without irony, tell tales of their earlier flights on Carter's Airforce One and recount their adventures in the Reagan years.... And it never occurs to anybody that it's the liberal punditocrisy that's stale and tired and most in need of changing. If we are now believing that Chris Matthews is a "net plus" for American politics, then the reality based community has followed the Bush administration straight down the rabbit hole.... Let's just say that I'd be a lot more impressed with Matthews' pitbull routine if he used it, just once, on somebody with some real clout instead of low level nobodies who don't appear on TV regularly. Bullying people without power just doesn't impress me much, especially when you have people on the show every day who actually have some and you kiss their asses with gusto. Sorry, not impressed...

Nunc Dimittis: ""Lord, now may thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation." Something that I thought I would never see has come to pass: Republican thug Karl Rove has denounced former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan as the equivalent of "a left-wing weblogger." Let me say that I have never been prouder to be a left-wing weblogger...