Is Chris Matthews, or His Booker, Kidding?

I've steered clear of the recent Hardball critiques, largely because I've heard Matthews say equally provocative things on what appears to be both sides of many issues. But, Katie bar the door, mama, get your children home, this afternoon's mini-"debate" on the politics of Iraq puts the show squarely in the category of absurdist cable news bookings.

Arguing on behalf of both the war and the political wisdom thereof was the highly intelligent, self-righteously provocative and verbally agile Christopher Hitchens. Arguing against both was...the Rev. Al Sharpton. I'm not kidding. What, Queen Latifah wasn't available? I turned it off, fearing that Hitchens would restrain himself from asking Sharpton, "And may I presume that the Reverend's sense of the true and the right and the real in the case of a country six thousand miles away is at least as acute as that sense is when it comes to the question of whether or not Tawana Brawley was raped?" I did hear the Hitchens-Galloway debate on Iraq last year, and even the profoundly glib MP George Galloway failed to make the only cogent case you can make against Hitch: Was Saddam the worst of the bad men in the world in 2003, and of all those bad men did he pose the greatest danger to the US? Barring that question, Hitchens can brandish his moral outrage about Saddam's cruelties in isolation, and then you're left arguing about....Tawana Brawley, I guess.