Chris Van Winkle
Russ Vaughn
Did Chris Matthews just wake up from a thirty-plus year snooze in the Catskills? This video of his interview with Jim Cramer is surreal at best and bizarre at worst. Where the hell has this spokesman for the Left been for the past thirty or forty years?
Right wing dictators in Portugal, Spain and Greece? Let's see here now, António de Oliveira Salazar, infamous dictator of Portugal has been pushing up grapevines since 1968; his neighbor, Francisco Franco, Spanish dictator, ceded power in 1974 to King Juan Carlos and as for Greece, those notorious colonels have also been out of power since 1974.
So who does Chris Van Winkle try to blame for the Greek financial meltdown in 2009? You got it, Bubba; ol' Chris, pre-eminent network historian and political guru to countless leftists around the nation tells Cramer that all these out-of-control welfare policies that have sent Greece spiraling down the drain recently are the work of non-other than all these rightwing boogie men long since dead and replaced by a series of socialist politicians who have handed the public service unions the keys to the treasury.
Hola, Chris! What you been smokin' dude? If Italy turns turtle, you gonna malign Mussolini? Ethiopia's not doing well either, so whaddaya think, Chrissie? Think we oughta haul up Haile Selassie and drag his bones though the streets of Addis Ababa?
As many of us have long been aware, Matthews is a fraud and a lightweight who's made it this far on a big mouth, bluster and bird brains. I'm Irish so I can say it: he's an over-rated, dummie who slid into success on the coat-tails of Tip O'Neill. If this is the best that MSPMS can provide in the way of intelligent programming, they're headed right out the same alley door as Newsweek and their declining ratings would seem to make me a more reliable oracle than Matthews. What is truly amazing to me is that the left actually does consider this out-of-touch moron one of their oracles. And they're supposed to be the intellectuals? It figures.
Oh, and Cramer, you wuss, you didn't call him on it, which makes you look just as stupid as Matthews. As an investor who listens to you occasionally, I really do not want to believe that you are truly as clueless as Chrissie.
americanthinker.com
Chris Matthews: Greece's Woes the Fault of Right-wing Governance; But Socialists Actually Control the Govt.
By Ken Shepherd (Bio | Archive)
Mon, 05/10/2010 - 18:39 ET
Chris Matthews is stuck in the 1970s, it seems, and I'm not talking about his pop culture references.
Talking with CNBC's Jim Cramer on the May 6 "Hardball" about the Greek fiscal crisis, everyone's favorite MSNBCer blamed "right-wing" dictators from the Cold War era for financial troubles in Greece, Portugal, and Spain [MP3 audio available here]:
I'm a political guy, you're a money guy. Let's crosswalk this thing. It seems to me that you and I grew up with the fact there were dictatorships in Europe. They were in the Iberian peninsula and in Greece. You had Franco, who overstayed the Second World War a bit, by about two generations. You had Salazar in Portugal, and of course you had the Greek colonels.
The right-wing governments in Europe seem to be the ones that are most precarious right now: Greece, Portugal, Spain.
What's the connection? Is this a complete coincidence, or is it old-line right-wing politics that never quite stabilized into serious social democratic countries? What happened?
The only trouble is that Spain, Portugal, and Greece are currently governed by left-wing socialist governments, not "right-wing" dictators or military regimes. What's more, the Socialists trounced the center-right in the most recent Greek elections in October 2009 in part because the conservatives were politically unpopular for pushing for an austerity package aimed at getting the country's fiscal house in order. From a New York Times article at the time:
In conceding defeat, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis said he had failed to persuade Greeks to accept the two years of austerity measures he had called for to steer the country out of its economic crisis. “The voters did not approve of this policy. It was their choice, and I respect it,” he said.
Mr. Karamanlis also stepped down as leader of the New Democracy Party, which suffered its worst performance since the restoration of Greek democracy in 1974 after years of military dictatorship. He said he would call a party congress to elect a new leader within a month.
Mr. Karamanlis, 53, called early elections last month, two years into a mandate dogged by corruption scandals and economic crisis, aiming to win a fresh mandate and stave off labor unrest. He had called for a freeze in public-sector wages to fight rising debt and unemployment, but he had difficulty pushing through important economic and structural reforms because he governed with a one-vote margin in Parliament.
Mr. Papandreou, 57, instead favored increased spending, including a $4.5 billion stimulus package to revive the Greek economy though infrastructure projects and environmentally sustainable development, while cracking down on tax evasion. Experts estimate that Greece loses $17.5 billion annually in unpaid income taxes and $13 billion in unpaid payroll taxes.
The victory by the Socialists here was a rare event for Europe, where the left has been losing ground and has often been unable to capitalize on the financial crisis for its own political gain.
But many Greek voters appeared to be voting against Mr. Karamanlis as much as for the Socialists. After two decades of Socialist rule, Mr. Karamanlis was elected in 2004 promising to restore faith in government.
For his part, Cramer failed to correct Matthews, agreeing with Matthews that:
You have a currency [the euro] that's made up of [countries run by] profligate right-wingers[and] non-profligate, actually prudent somewhat left-wingers. I'm talking about Germany. Germany is the rock bed here.
Germany is governed by a center-right coalition led by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Matthews gets it precisely backwards. And he's the SMART ONE on his network.
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