Comforting the comfortable

Watching a bizarrely subdued Chris Matthews in the above clip is like reading the tea leaves on what I fear* the next four years of MSM coverage are going to be like. Doctor Matthews says he sees it as his job to make Obama’s presidency work because, in his diagnosis, “this country needs a successful presidency.”

So, Chris, America could afford the past decade and more of your thrashing two sitting Presidents on the feeblest of pretexts. We were strong, so you and your colleagues on the other networks could run your cable news abattoirs, slaughtering whatever shred of confidence in government the poor rubes in your audience had. America could handle it because, goddamit, you needed the market share.

But now times are really tough. Too tough for tough questions. Too tough for all that J-school nonsense about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Too tough for quaint notions like holding our government to account.

What really grates about this is that all over the world there are real journalists who call their government to account even at the risk of their own life, limb, and freedom. These brave people pry their adversarial role from government clutches. Chris Matthews spends a decade waving it around like a plastic sword and then, bored with it, meekly hands it back.

UPDATE: *Edited to reflect the chill pill I just took.