Much to my chagrin, the early part of Countdown last night consisted of Bush's farewell address to the nation. It was a predictable speech, emphasizing his few achievements and glossing over the major failures of his administration. I hadn't planned on watching it, but there was little else on and I took some small comfort in knowing that it would be buttressed by the commentary of Keith Olbermann and his guests. Chris Matthews' ensuing diatribe, however, would leave me stunned and angry.
This is a youtube clip of the segment in question. I have also included a transcript at the end of the diary entry.
Matthews starts off by making some good points. Bush is clearly a child of privilege, and probably one of the most privileged in this country. He rode to power on the basis of his name and family background, all the while ridiculously clearing brush on his ranch to look like one of the "salt of the earth" and insulting out intelligence in the process.
He then rightfully digs into the neocon idea of installing democracies by force, but then quickly goes astray, railing at the idea that Arabs should be electing their own leaders.
It’s been the leaders that you could deal with, the potentates, the kings we set up over there, the British did, the people that were propped up with oil wealth. We could deal with those people, but the minute the street had a hand in the politics over there, it was radical.
The idea that somehow the mechanical nature of holding elections, somehow moderates a country. He said it again in his speech tonight that somehow elections and democracy and freedom lead to a moderation on the part of these people. Well, these people have a problem in the Middle East. They want to fight. They don’t like Israel. They don’t like the West. There’s a real seething anger over there towards the West. We better start to figure it out instead of retreating to these notions that he’s been carrying around with him ever since he met Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives.
Yes, it is true that the mechanical act of elections are not enough to moderate a society. Yes, it is true that many in the "Arab street" are seething at the west, are angry at Israel's existence and America, the purported brokers of peace, seemingly always taking the Israeli side in the conflict.
It is also true that these people, like anyone else on the planet, deserve to be free. They deserve to choose leaders of their own, whether the West considers them radical or not. They deserve the same freedoms of speech, assembly, and press that we often take for granted in the US.
The fact that Arab countries may elect somebody we do not like does not mean we should support pro-western despots. I think it is a progressive ideal that people deserve to live free from oppression, and I am ashamed that someone who purports to be from the left can go on Countdown and make this type of a statement without so much as a peep from the normally outspoken Olbermann.
Nobody here is a fan of Hamas, but there are reasons this group got elected. Besides their hardline anti-Israel line, years of Fatah leadership had failed to improve living conditions in Palestine, while Hamas had built a reputation among the people with its charities and day-to-day services for Palestinians.
Clearly, we in the West and those in Israel also have a right to live free from intimidation by a democratically elected government in the Mideast that we don't like. There is an institute that deals with that. Perhaps Bush doesn't care for it, but it is called the UN.
So should we go back to the days of the British Empire and the Cold War and prop up those dictators that we like? I would certainly hope not.
Chris Matthews words disturb me. I think his words are racist, somehow thinking that Arabs want something different from what we in the West want. That they don't deserve to have elections.
I do not want to use the word "freedom", as it seems that Bush has co-opted it for his right-wing agenda, but I hope that those progressive minded individuals on this site whom I greatly admire and respect do wish for the same privileges for their fellow man in the middle east that they themselves enjoy now.
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The entire transcript of the segment:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: The scary thing about the last eight years is that George Bush, whatever you think of him, came to office pretty much tabula rasa in terms of philosophy. He didn’t have much. He was a rich kid driving his father’s car. He got to be President because of his father, let’s face it, the same way he got into school and everything else, the same way he got his car probably. But the scary thing about Bush is somewhere he came to meet people like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz and Feith and the rest of them. They had this ideology that he bought in to, this ideology that somehow the United States in waging war and taking over countries somehow was fighting for freedom, and somehow in doing so we would encourage a moderation in the Arab world. Well, history would have taught him, and I know he just put down history by quoting Jefferson which was unfair to Jefferson, history would have told him that in the Arab world, it’s the Arab street, it’s the regular people out there, the vast population in numbers, who oppose the state of Israel, who have always been radicalized. It’s been the leaders that you could deal with, the potentates, the kings we set up over there, the British did, the people that were propped up with oil wealth. We could deal with those people, but the minute the street had a hand in the politics over there, it was radical.
Look what happened under him. Algeria had a chance at radical politics, and look what we got there, a bit of, a taste of that. Hamas elected on the West Bank, that did a great deal for peace-making in the Middle East. The election of Ahmadinejad. The idea that somehow the mechanical nature of holding elections, somehow moderates a country. He said it again in his speech tonight that somehow elections and democracy and freedom lead to a moderation on the part of these people. Well, these people have a problem in the Middle East. They want to fight. They don’t like Israel. They don’t like the West. There’s a real seething anger over there towards the West. We better start to figure it out instead of retreating to these notions that he’s been carrying around with him ever since he met Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives.
I go back to this. The scary thing about Bush is he picked up on -- almost in the way that a hermit crab does -- another identity in becoming President. He didn't have a book knowledge to come to the White House with, having ignored and made fun of at college the pointy heads, he called them, or the intellectuals. He made fun of the smart kids at school and hung around with the jocks.
He decided he’s going to start listening to the intellectuals, so he said this Paul Wolfowitz is such a smart guy, let's go with this neo-conservative idea, let's go into Iraq. He listened to Dick Cheney, he listened to the rest of them. And, all of a sudden, he became this new scholar of freedom, and he's going to spend the rest of his life selling this stuff. This stuff cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqis, it cost the lives of 4,000 U.S. service people, and we don’t know what’s coming around the corner in Iraq. The Brits took over that part of the world and turned it into a series of monarchies. We’ve taken over and we supply it with our ideology. Well, we’ll see if it lasts because, in the end, the Arabs are going to have their own culture, their own politics, and down the road, we’re going to have to make peace with the elements we can find to make peace with.
The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that's going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he's still selling it, and that's the tragedy of the last eight years. He's learned the wrong lessons, and he's out there selling them again tonight.