Like most of the rest of the country, I don’t watch NBC and I don’t think I have since “Friends” went off the air. Heck, until this week, I didn’t even know Conan O’Brien had taken over “The Tonight Show.”  I used to watch “Sunday Night Football,” until they added Keith Olbermann to the mix, and then I decided six hours of football was enough for one day. And I certainly don’t watch any of their “news”/political programming. I can’t even tell you where the network’s  liberal little sister, MSNBC, falls on my cable channel line-up or what time that show with that one chick who kind of looks like a mix between my 8th grade gym teacher and Anderson Cooper comes on. But what I can tell you is this: Chris Matthews has got to be one of the most vile human beings on earth.

What does one person have to have happen in their lifetime that makes them become so angry and hateful? I don’t watch “Hardball,” but it seems as though Matthews makes some other network’s  headlines every other day by putting someone down, taking things out of context and just flat-out lying about people he obviously doesn’t like or want to understand. This week alone, Matthews has gotten his thrills by by putting words in Rush Limbaugh’s mouth and calling tea party attendees “racists,” and obsessively calling Sarah Palin stupid and out-of-touch. 

I have to admit, I find his obsession with Sarah Palin kind of strange since she seems to be the person most likely NOT to give him a tingle up his leg.  But after watching a few clips from his shows, I’m willing to bet she gives him a tingle somewhere else.  Seriously, if you find someone to be such a waste of space, why would you spend the precious minutes of your national television show putting them down? We know it’s not for the ratings; Matthews bashes her consistently and has for the last year and a half, but as of the end of December, he was averaging, oh, about 58,000 viewers and  his numbers seem to be steadily declining. 

So, what did Matthews have to say this week?  First of all, upon announcing Palin had signed on to be a Fox News contributor, Matthews asked, “How can she be a pundit? She doesn’t know anything.”  Don’t worry, Chris, most of us wonder the same thing about you.

But on Thursday, after Palin appeared on Glenn Beck’s show (a show that coincidentally attracted over three million viewers; how many times does 58,000 go into three million?), Beck asked her who her favorite Founding Father was. Palin answered the question by essentially saying “all of them” and explaining why she said that, but eventually said she favored George Washington. Of course, this answer wasn’t good enough for Matthews, who if I had to guess, probably hates all the Founding Fathers for, ya know, founding this horrible country. He insinuated that Palin had no idea what she was talking about, that she was totally clueless on American history, and this is what makes her so darn out-of-touch. Yes, because when I think of out-of-touch, unpatriotic Americans, Sarah Palin is the first person who comes to mind.  Matthews said,

“You know in school when you didn’t read the book and you had to answer the essay question of the book and you hadn’t read it. “I thought the book was interesting at times, sometimes it was boring but a lot of it was very interesting.” The book you didn’t read. That’s her story. America is the book she didn’t read and yet she’s running around the country as this patriotic icon of American what? She doesn’t know us.”

Earlier in the week, Matthews took several other shots at Palin, while interviewing the authors of the book Game Change.  He had lines like, “Is it possible that her head was really that empty?…Has she ever taken an SAT afternoon exam,” “don’t put her on Jeopardy,” and something about “neo-cons” taking a “cruise to Alaska” where Palin was “standing at the docks with an empty head saying, ‘I’m willing to say what you want me to say.’”

I really don’t get why Matthews is so obsessed with her. As I said, it’s not like it’s helping his ratings. And I can’t think of any other single political commentator who appears to have such a need to constantly put down a person who doesn’t even hold a political office anymore and hasn’t in six months.  George W. Bush not withstanding.  Sure, people like Beck and Limbaugh are constantly picking on Obama, but um, he actually has the power to do things that affect their lives. Is he threatened? Is he jealous? Is it some sort of weird pent-up sexual energy (hey, if the POTUS gives him tingles, you never know). Maybe it’s a little bit of all the above, but I can’t help but picture Matthews, sitting in his home at night, cutting out articles and pictures of the former governor and taping them to his wall like some sort of crazed lunatic.

Here’s my advice to Matthews:  instead of focusing so much energy on someone who is essentially a private citizen, someone you, yourself, have dubbed unintelligent and irrelevant, how about focusing on the people who do matter?  When questioned about your biased reporting, you said, “My job is to help this country.”  How do you help the country by making the same old tired jokes about Sarah Palin? Don’t you owe your viewers more than letting on how much she gets under your skin?  Or are you such an elitist jackass that your show is not about helping this country or your viewers, but helping your self-centered agenda?