Like Michele, head of the French “regular Resistance” (non-communist) in the BBC WWII satire, ‘Alo ‘Alo, I am going to “say this only once:”
Memo to Chris Matthews and everyone else at MSNBC: The “3/5 Compromise” did not say that “blacks were 3/5 of a person,” arguing that slaves (not merely blacks) should not count as a full person for the apportionment of congressional seats was the anti-slavery position, and the Constitution is not, therefore an inherently racist document.
And like Michele of the Regular Resistance, I’m sure I will have to say this only once about 987,987 more times as attacking the Constitution as fatally flawed is essential to their political agenda.
MATTHEWS: But I also think there‘s something here that‘s dangerous, a strain of thought—a strain of thought—in kind of a know-nothing right-wing movement aimed at scrubbing clean the Founding Fathers of any flaws so that they, the right wing, can claim them and the Constitution to be infallible and their cause to be the new absolute truth.
Matthews spent the week screaming about Michele Bachman, calling her “crazy” and a “balloonhead” for saying that there were “founders” who “fought tirelessly against slavery” and “forebears” who ended it, and that they don’t get enough credit for that in today’s PC history accounts.
And while I will agree she could have been a bit more precise, Matthews’s hysterical response revealed two things: 1. He is almost as afraid of Michele Bachmann as he is of Sarah Palin, and 2. He is a complete ignoramus about U.S. history before 1950.
Okay, we already knew that second one.
The guy screaming that Michele Bachman should go back to elementary school is the guy who thought that John Adams tried the Redcoats from the Boston Massacre in “an American court” — in 1770!– wondered why “frogmen like in Captain Nemo” didn’t fix the BP oil spill-- at twice the depth that would crush a nuclear submarine– and thought that “Republicans” wrote the 2nd Amendment and didn’t know it was part of the original Constitution.
And that only scratches the surface of the “history” Chris Matthews invents constantly.
