Chris Matthes -- Who Hijacked Our War of Righteous Outrage and Left Us With This?

I used to like Chris Matthews, but he seems to have been given the message that he is supposed to out-O'Reilly Bill O'Reilly. He's had a couple of popular books that can't match the sales of his rival's and the taste of success seems to have made him a little tipsy. He's no longer thoughtful and nuanced. It's all shoot from the hip, and overstating his case.

Here he writes, "They (the Bush Administration) have diverted the hunt for bin Laden much as the Crusades of a millennium ago were diverted from saving the Holy Land to idiotic conquests of Belgrade, Constantinople and any number of targets along the way." Something tells me that Don Rumsfeld and George Bush are not as hyperactive and easily distracted as Matthews thinks. The "Axis of Evil" speech was not written for the purpose of rabble rousing. It was intended to 1. let the American People know that it won't be all over with Afghanistan and 2. let the regimes he mentioned know that we haven't forgotten them.

At the same time, it is stupid to interpret the speech as a change of focus away from bin Laden and al Qaeda. If our European critics can't think about more than one idea at a time, our military is quite capable of doing so. They probably are good chess players, too.