Warning! I'm about to vent some frustration with Chris Matthews. No profanity, Jeralyn! I honor the protocol of the TalkLeft blog.

My annoyance with Matthews focuses on two of his behaviors. First, he sucks up and drops names. Maybe he sucks-up because he worships power regardless of character (Tom DeLay, Fred Thompson, etc.? Sheesh!); he drops names almost certainly because he's more or less subconsciously emulating the nursery rhyme character Little Jack Horner:

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner

Eating his Christmas pie,

He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum

And said "What a good boy am I!

"Look whom I know! Look whom I party with! Look whom I can call a `friend'! How cool is that?  See what a good boy I am?"

Time to pause and gather the threads of the argument.

Just above, I was talking about two manifestations of one aspect of my annoyance with Chris Matthews: namely, his strange hero worship and his pride in being a cocktail-circuit, prideful Washington insider. My second annoyance is that he rarely actually listens to what his "guests" are saying; instead he looks for (or forces) wedges to allow him to interrupt and pontificate.

Yes, I know. This is S.O.P. for the major media. But that doesn't mitigate its annoyance, let alone make it positive, constructive, or right. Indeed, it's exactly the opposite. Tonight's example? The guests came from opposing ideological perspectives, but they agreed that what matters most for Obama's re-election chances is whether the unemployment percentage is perceived to be falling, idling, or rising.

So how did Matthews respond? "Yeah, yeah. But the unemployment rate right now is...." (Memory, not transcript. But I'm confident that's fair.)

From a generous perspective, Matthews seems deaf, dismissive, and/or disrespectful here. From a less generous perspective, he seems rude, dismissive, close-minded, and ... well, my point's no doubt obvious.