Wheelhouse : Matthews, this and that
Posted on Sunday, September 17, 2006
While watching 9 / 11 anniversary coverage Monday evening, I came across an interview with bipedal attack dog Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's excellent "Hardball. "Matthews was in the process of chastising a caller or e-mailer, I'm not sure which, over that person's suggestion that politics had gotten in the way of sound decision making in the years since 9 / 11.
Matthews disagreed, and gave a brief lecture on politics as he sees it, describing the political process in glowing terms as the way we solve our differences in this country, including our differences over the war on terror. On one hand, he's right - political debate can and should serve that purpose. But when most people use the word "politics," that's not what they have in mind. They're describing partisan turf wars waged to gain and keep power and privilege. Those turf wars have little to do with solving our nation's problems.
Matthews hosts a great show, one of the best and most journalistically responsible on television. He's also an excellent writer. His book "Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America"is a fascinating read. But while delivering his off-the-cuff lecture Monday evening, he sounded as out of touch as any of the powerful and privileged politicos he interviews and writes about. That caller or emailer was dead-on. Unfortunately.
• • • Are baseball fans ready to coronate Ryan Howard as the legitimate, post-steroid-era, single-season home-run king if he leaves the yard 62 or more times this season ? This one is. I've already done all the compartmentalizing I need to do, readying a nicely appointed throne room in the section of my mind set aside for housing sports-related memories. That section's a lot more cluttered and subdivided than it used to be, thanks to guys like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa - suspected juicers all - and their assaults on baseball's record book. It's that way for most baseball fans. Not knowing which records to believe, we're forced to ignore them altogether, or construct elaborate systems for judging their authenticity by degree. Oh well. Life in general is getting more complex by the day. Why shouldn't the process of tracking baseball statistics take the same jagged, curving path ? The funny thing is, I don't like the Phillies, and I really don't know that much about Ryan Howard. But I know he's not Bonds, McGwire or Sosa, and that's enough.
• • • Here's a lead-in for you: "Katie Couric last night underwent her second on-air colonoscopy. " That little gem was penned by New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser the night after Couric's debut as host of the CBS Evening News. Peyser's assessment of Couric's opening act went downhill from there, if you can believe that. It was far from the only negative review Couric received, but Peyser's column was especially venomous, even for the famously outrageous Post. "Her face was Botoxed beyond normal human endurance," Peyser wrote. Then," Katie chose to wear an unfortunate white blazer - the result, no doubt, of some jokester lying to her face when Katie asked, ' Does this make me look fat ?'"There's more. "The best that can be said about Katie Couric was that she did not trip over her 5-inch stiletto heels when she toddled across the floor of the set, crossing her bare legs like some ridiculous tramp," Peyser wrote. Good lord ! Everybody knew the knives would be out for Couric, but did anyone really expect her to be so thoroughly eviscerated after just one broadcast ? Peyser didn't mince words - just her subject. There has to be something personal there.
• • • Each year, distemper-addled raccoons emerge from the Benton County woods and cause distress among residents who mistake their symptoms for menacing behavior. No doubt, many who encounter these brazen marauders think they've lived through a Mutual of Omaha moment, but they don't know the half of it. In Washington state, a pack of raccoons are reported to have killed 10 cats, attacked a small dog and bitten a human, forcing him to undergo treatment for rabies. Olympia, Wash., resident Tony Benjamin told the Associated Press," We used to love the raccoons, … but this year things changed. They went nuts. "Horrifying.
• • • Thank heaven for pro football. The games played last Sunday and Monday nights so overshadowed ABC's "The Path to 9 / 11 "miniseries - the show I wrote about last week - that one could almost forget that the history-muddling abomination aired. And on another pigskin-related note, hats off to the New Orleans Saints for their week-one win. Granted, it was only the hapless Browns, but the victory no doubt meant a lot to people throughout Katrina-ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi, where the Saints have long been the home team - for better or worse. This time they came through.
• • • John Dilmore Jr. is opinion page editor of The Benton County Daily Record. His column appears on Sundays. He can be reached at johnd @ nwanews. com.
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