Tweety getting it right

Just saw this.

Normally, in an interview, the process is something like this: The interviewer asks a question. The guest gives a little hint of an answer and then launches into a message point. If it's a close connect, that it all seems responsive enough, then the interviewer may just go on to the next planned question. Otherwise, the interviewer either listens to the point, finds it interesting, surrenders any unfinished remainder of the old point and asks a follow-up on the new point, or thinks that he hasn't quite finished with the old point, so asks another question about it. It could be the same question, but it will probably be a little different, which helps smooth over the lack of a sufficient answer the first time. The guest gets the drift that the easiest way to move on is to gratify the original question a little more than last time before going back to talking points, and does exactly that. The interviewer is satisfied, or else the process repeats until the interviewer either gets an adequate answer, or moves on.

If the guest does not play by the rules and courteously attempt to answer the question before getting in his owned canned ad for his or her position, the occasional interviewer will throw a fit and end the interview, but usually, they sit for it, and at worst the guess is not invited back.

In this case, Chris Matthews would not abandon his question. If you were in court, refusal to answer a question put to you two dozen times would suggest the judge had some mental infirmity such as narcolepsy that caused him not to have the witness held in contempt in a small cell until ready to answer the question. Poor Kevin James skipped history in high school and did not know what Neville Chamberlain had actually done which constituted appeasement. As Matthews later put it, he didn't just sit down and talk, he gave away countries. I might debate Matthews on that, but James could not because he simply had no clue. He gave no indication that he knew who Chamberlain was, what his office was, what nation he represented, or what he said or did that made him the poster boy for everything wrong with appeasement. Yet he went through the motions of a nationally televised debate with Matthews, characterizing Chamberlain's actions as no different from Obama's allegedly proposed actions, (or maybe just Obama's statement advocating talks was appeasement enough.)

I would have done it a little differently from Matthews. I would have said, "Look, be quiet a second. You have to give me a turn to ask the question. What I'm asking is not whether Chamberlain's actions constituted appeasement. You've given me your view of that several times. I'd like for you to go through the particular things that he did, and tell me which in your view were appeasement and which were not," instead of saying "what did he do" over and over.
In a perfect world, I would have added, "Let's start with May 28, 1937, what affirmative steps should he have taken then? Should he have moved to cancel the changes to the bilatreal naval agreement? Why was the remilitarization of the Rhineland not a crisis? Walk us through it just through the Anschluss and tell me what you consider appeasement up to that point."

It would be very interesting to get knee deep into comparisons between Chamberlain's situation and that which will face our next president, and the lead-ups to those points. Distracted by flare-ups in the Empire, lacking good intelligence, military forces allowed to fall behind what was needed, not strong enough to act unilatertally, strategic resources at stake, an adversary seen as a counterweight to other forces in a complex field, and influenced by a past of recent injury with its ideological echoes, a polity came to decisions. Not the best nor the worst, but inadequate to stop the bad that happened next. The biggest difference is that now there is no agreed-upon Hitler, just a lot of players whom the Republicans are eager to audition for the role because they really want a Hitler.

Okay, I'm babbling now, I'll stop. It's just good to see someone in the media not putting up with the crap.