In 1993, when Democratic President Bill Clinton was seeking to restore Aristide to office, I was in Haiti working on a PBS "Frontline" documentary. Part of my job was to spend time with operatives of right-wing paramilitary groups supporting the dictatorship of Gen. Raoul Cedras.
Some of these operatives told me about faxes and other messages they were receiving from Republicans in Washington advising them how to frustrate Clinton's initiatives for restoring Aristide to power. Those efforts, in fact, were turned back by a violent confrontation at the Port-au-Prince docks when the USS Harlan County tried to land, humiliating Clinton and the United States.
Now, that was real "hardball" politics: Republicans undercutting the foreign policy of a sitting U.S. President to make him look ineffectual and feckless.
A year later, Clinton saw no choice but to oust Cedras through a U.S. military invasion. Aristide was restored to the presidency but his final months in office were tightly restricted with him serving primarily as a figurehead.
When Aristide was elected again in 2001, he faced renewed hostility from the Haitian elite and from the second Bush administration, which helped engineer his removal from office in 2004, airlifting him against his will to the Central African Republic.
Yet, Chris Matthews summed up this extraordinary history as a situation in which the Haitian people just didn't take their politics seriously enough.
Massachusetts Follies
Days later, without a blush for any inconsistency, Matthews was discussing the pivotal Massachusetts Senate race in the most frivolous terms, dividing his coverage between the latest poll numbers and commentary over the campaign gaffes of Democratic candidate Martha Coakley.
Beyond noting the obvious impact on health-care legislation, Matthews shed little light on the experience and policy positions of the two candidates. Instead, watchers of "Hardball" got to hear Coakley's brief confusion over Schilling's allegiance in the Yankees- Red Sox rivalry and learned that Scott Brown is a photogenic guy who travels around in a truck.
Matthews dispensed with the serious stuff. He had little interest in mentioning Coakley's history as an effective prosecutor, her central role in winning settlements from contractors of Boston's infamous Big Dig project and from Wall Street firms that engaged in deceptive practices, including $60 million from Goldman Sachs to settle allegations that it promoted unfair home loans.
Coakley also backs President Barack Obama's decision to try some terrorism suspects in civilian courts and his proposed tax on financial institutions to recoup taxpayers' assistance that bailed the banks out of the crisis of 2008, two of Obama's positions that Brown opposes.
Plus, Coakley has taken some more progressive stances than Obama, opposing his troop build-up in Afghanistan and seeking to overturn the federal legal definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
For his part, Brown favors more Reagan-Bush-style tax cuts, supports the near-drowning interrogation method called waterboarding, and opposes same-sex marriage, even voting for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.
However, Matthews's "Hardball" was more absorbed by the populist celebrities that have stumped with Brown, including Schilling, Massachusetts football hero Doug Flutie and actor John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff Clavin in the TV show about a fictional Boston bar, "Cheers."
As the U.S. government sinks further into dysfunction incapable of addressing the nation's worsening economic and social crises as it wallows in a debt deeper than any Third World country could dream of, historians may look back on some of the empty-headed commentary of programs like "Hardball with Chris Matthews" for clues as to why the United States failed.
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