Chris Matthews Hoist By His Own Petard!

Yid with Lid points to an excellent piece of pwnage of Chris Matthews, done by Byron York of National Review fame.

Mr. Tingles went into a state of high dudgeon over Rush Limbaugh's use of the word "regime" to describe the Obama administration. Perhaps not so much dudgeon as apoplexy!

"I've never seen language like this in the American press, referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country…. We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it.

I never heard the word 'regime,' before, have you? I don't even think Joe McCarthy ever called this government a 'regime.'"

According to the research done by York,

In fact, a search of the Nexis database for "Bush regime" yields 6,769 examples from January 20, 2001 to the present.

It was used 16 times in the New York Times, beginning with an April 4, 2001 column by Maureen Dowd -- who wrote, "Seventy-five days into the Bush regime and I'm a wreck" -- and ending with a March 6, 2009 editorial denouncing the "frightening legal claim advanced by the Bush regime to justify holding [accused terrorist Ali al-Marri]."

"Bush regime" was used 24 times in the Washington Post, beginning with a January 22, 2001 profile of Marshall Wittmann by Howard Kurtz -- who noted that Wittmann served as "a Health and Human Services deputy assistant secretary in the first Bush regime" -- and ending with an October 6, 2009 column by Dana Milbank which quoted far-left antiwar protester Medea Benjamin questioning whether the Obama administration "looks very different from the Bush regime.

And the Pièce de résistance? Matthews himself used the term about Bush!

"Let's go to the Reverend Al Sharpton," Matthews said. "Reverend Sharpton, what do you make of this letter and this panoply of the left condemning the Bush regime?"

Oh, my! Hoist by his own petard! Mr. Tingles is exposed either for his extreme ADD or his mind numbing hypocrisy! Thank God for the Internet Age, where shenanigans like this do not go unnoticed
(or unpwned!) Heh.

Update: For the sake of the Elizabethan challenged, I offer the following:

To be "hoist by one's own petard", roughly translated: Blown up by one's own explosive charge or bomb.

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar;

-From Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

Today's lesson in Elizabethan and archaic language has been brought to you by the letters
"M", "S","N", "B" and "C"! Heh.

Cross posted at Say Anything