Last night on Hardball, Chris Matthews said Osama Bin Laden “sounds like an over-the-top Michael Moore, if not a Michael Moore.”
Tens of thousands of people visited a website — http://openlettertochrismatthews.blogspot.com/ — demanding Matthews apologize to Moore.
During tonight’s show, Matthews didn’t apologize. Instead he claimed that he was misunderstood:
MATTHEWS: Why is he doing it? Why is he trying to track what he picks up in the internet and from the media as the lingo of the left in America, like Moore? Why would he start to talk like Moore? People misunderstood what I said last night. I think he’s getting some advice from people, he’s getting some lingo, some wordage that he hears working in the United States about this thing for war profiteers and he’s jumping on every opportunity. Is that what you are saying Joe?
SCARBOROUGH: Listen, if somebody can’t look at the words that Bin Laden said last night and match them up with what Michael Moore said, with what John Kerry said on Face the Nation with he said Americans were terrorizing Iraqi women and children in their homes hat night, which is what Bin Laden in effect said. What Ted Kennedy has been saying. Remember he said after Abu Ghraib that Saddam’s torture chambers were turned over to — chambers were turned over to new management, U.S. troops, that’s the same thing Bin Laden hit on.
Sounds a lot like another smear to me.