Junto Boys

ZELL!

From Jay Nordlinger:

You may want to hear a little more from Zell Miller — this is from the Imus radio program: "A 73-year-old man doesn't have any business coming to New York and getting involved in all this stuff. He ought to stay down in Young Harris with his two yellow labs, Gus and Woodrow, and let the world go by, I guess. I had just been holding one" — just been holding one! — "for Chris Matthews ever since I saw him browbeat Michelle Malkin on his show that night. He wouldn't let that little 5'2", 95-pound girl say a word, and I just said to myself, 'If he ever gets into my face like that, I'm gonna pop him.'"

I missed the Zell tirade on Mathews. I tuned in at the very end where Zell was wrapping up and Mathews spent the rest of the night stunned at what happened. Mathews kept saying, "Maybe he misunderstood my question." Now it all makes sense. Zell was thinking about what happened to Michelle Malkin. I posted her experience on August 20th.

Nordlinger points out that David Gergen among others have called Miller's adress a "hate speech." If you hate to see your country return to the appeasement of the 1990s, I guess it was. How would those Democrats upset with Zell reconcile it with the stuff that Sen. Robert Byrd has been saying (in the same accent) about Bush these last two years?

It also gives me a big smile to hear all those people who saw Jim Jeffords defection as growth and maturity, treat Miller as some sort of turncoat.

FOLLOW-UP: Andrew McCarthy does a great job of breaking down the reality of the Mathews/Miller confrontation.

Matthews’s attack-dog line of questioning was entirely reasonable . . . for a partisan. If this had truly been an objective news program, however, Matthews would have been sitting in a debater’s seat with a different, neutral anchor between him and Miller. Then, it would have been fine for him to press Miller — who was more than up to responding — because Matthews would have then been reciprocally grilled on his own baggage, not fraudulently portrayed as if he didn’t have any. But Matthews, in the shameless mainstream network practice, was slated as both partisan and anchor, prosecutor and judge. When he didn’t like Miller’s answers, he stepped on them. He snidely suggested that Miller had attacked Kerry’s love of country, though Miller had insisted — and the rhetoric bears out — that he was challenging Kerry’s judgment, not his patriotism.