Elizabeth Warren Crushes Chris Matthews, And A Word On Cement

By Sandy Dechert

Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, met more than his match last Thursday when he took on lively freshman Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Looked as if Matthews got a bit more than he expected, in the form of a very well-reasoned and remarkably civil tongue-lashing from the Massachusetts people’s choice.

A man with plenty of Washington experience from his days as an aide to longtime Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill as well as years in the news business, Matthews laid into Warren, and the Democrat-led (but filibuster-prone) Senate, and the President for inaction—or perhaps only glacial slowness—on getting economic promises fulfilled.

To what Daily Kos contributor Egberto Willies described as “the most nonsensical rant from a journalist,” when Matthews ignored political realities and blasted the Democrats, Warren came up fighting and challenged the righteous nitpicking of left-leaning Democratic whiners:

“Stop this. We just voted on this last week. You just stop and think about it. Because all the things you’ve talked about every time we get up and talk about helping education … we talk about roads and bridges … we talk about NIH research … the Republicans say the exact same thing … there is not enough money …

And then they say they are going to fight to protect every tax loophole that currently exist that permits billionaires to pay at a lower tax rate than their secretaries. They fight to protect every subsidy” for the oil and gas industry….

Egberto Willies linked to a short clip of the interview in the Daily Kos, but “>the whole thing (11 minutes) is well worth watching. Sharp and to the point, Warren gives Matthews an earful on the lopsided Congress, how progressives and other Democrats are fighting back to build opportunity in America, and how involvement of every citizen is needed to return human priorities and progress to the current constipation (my word, not hers) of politics.

By the way…. One comment on Matthews’ devotion to construction jobs and “the smell of pouring cement” to mend crumbling infrastructure, which he says the Chinese are doing four times faster than the USA: one of the greatest producers of carbon dioxide in the world is the cement and concrete industry. Maybe we need to pay closer attention to what goes into the things we build.

Sandy Dechert covers environmental, health, renewable and conventional energy, and climate change news. She’s worked for groundbreaking environmental consultants and a Fortune 100 health care firm, writes two top-level blogs on Examiner.com, ranked #2 on ONPP’s 2011 Top 50 blogs on Women’s Health, and attributes her modest success to an “indelible habit of poking around to satisfy my own curiosity.”

Mirrored from Planetsave.com

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