60 Minutes of Hell

I'm punishing myself this afternoon by watching the Hardball college tour at Villanova University with Chris Matthews and the exalted John McCain. It's about enough to make you throw up.

The show starts with Tweety asking McCain how he's different than Bush, which is not a question but an opportunity for McCain to ways to set himself apart from Mr. 28%. So this being a college crowd he starts in with a discussion about how he believes in global warming and that man is to blame and how we need to reduce our reliance on greenhouse gases, that the consequences of inaction are too great. This is the guy who this morning - THIS MORNING - called for a gas tax holiday for the entire summer, which would surely increase greenhouse gas emissions.

No follow-up from Tweety.

Then he asked the leading question "You also have a different view on torture," and McCain got to make his serious principled face and say "We should never torture anyone in American custody... we're in a war for hearts and minds, and if we're not any better than our enemies then it makes it harder to people to choose.... Abu Ghraib was (the insurgency's) greatest recruiting tool... We should not do anything that our enemies do. It's a very important question about what kind of country we are." McCain, of course, supported Bush's veto of the intelligence authorization bill that would have banned torture techniques like waterboarding from the CIA's menu of interrogation options.

No follow-up from Tweety.

Then there was a discussion on Iraq, where McCain got to say how the war was mishandled and how he was the only one to criticize Rumsfeld and call for his head. None of that is true.

No follow-up from Tweety.

Matthews gave McCain a free hand to spin his 100-year comments, saying that he was describing a situation after the war is over, but of course he's willing to keep troops there until the war is over, so I don't see the difference. McCain admitted that the Maliki move into Basra had a downside to it and actually said "maybe I'm digging for the pony here," but this was an unforced error, as Matthews followed up absolutely nothing.

Then he went to the student questions, which they pick beforehand, by the way, and the first guy asked if McCain considered himself a "typical white person" (a hit on Obama), and the second guy took a hit on Hillary Clinton's beer-and-shot photo-op. This gave McCain an opportunity to play the serious bipartisan maverick and say that he wants a respectful campaign free of character attacks. He must have been napping when his suspended staffer Soren Dayton started pushing "Obama is an elitist" messaging, or when his number one surrogate Holy Joe Lieberman agreed with a right-wing radio host that Obama might be a Marxist, and his campaign adviser Karl Rove agreed.

Tweety came back and called out those two students for asking "wise-ass questions", because he hasn't focused on non-issues his entire, you know, career. And then, Tweety came back from break and immediately asked if Obama was an elitist. After McCain said "no" but then went on to talk about how elitist the comments were, Tweety asked his first follow-up question, which was essentially: But given his upbringing, WHY is Obama an elitist?

I'm telling you, they should put this thing in a time capsule. It's a symbol of everything that's wrong with the media.

... Just have to add this section when McCain boldly denounces 527s and says that he'll work to stop them during the general election, and that he intends to attack Obama for breaking his word if he opts out of the public financing system, and there's no mention of the fact that McCain is currently a fugitive from justice, breaking the law with each passing day by spending excess money while remaining inside the public system for the primaries.

Shoot me in the mouth.

UPDATE: Apparently the kid that asked the question about Hillary "hitting the sauce" is Fox News anchor Steve Doocy's son. Having worked in television, there's no way that the Hardball folks didn't know about this unless they're complete boobs.