"Ship of tools"

Yes, Chris Matthews is insane. But given his weird ideas about the workings of the internal combustion engine, surely he's lost his pundit credentials to talk about the concerns of real people.

Soon, this well-matched pair of pundits were explaining the presidential politics of the past eight years. Matthews raised a typically vacuous point—and omigod! Oh! My! God! Rich waxed about George Bush’s “brilliance:”

MATTHEWS (continuing directly): You know, the good question in the last campaign—and neither candidate did so well—and I think Bush may have edged out John Kerry on that—to get to your point, if your car is broke down along the side of the road, and you’re trying to fix a tire or whatever, your engine is steamed up, over-boiled or whatever, who’s going to stop and help you? Hillary? Obama? Who wins? Does either one of them win it out? Or are they both too big-picture to stop and help you?

RICH: Well, I think, in this campaign, they would not only both stop and help you, but they would change the tire themselves.

I’m joking. And there may be also a gender issue there that you would—you would think the man would do it. But, but I do think it’s a continuing problem among Democrats in general, if not Obama. For instance, that’s why, even if it’s unfair, the $400 haircut keeps coming back to haunt John Edwards.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

RICH: And sort of the brilliance of George Bush was, even though he was an aristocrat, an Andover-Yale-Harvard blue blood, he somehow convinced the American public that he would change that tire and buy you a beer, while he had a non-alcoholic beer himself—

MATTHEWS: Yes.

RICH: —and share it with you.

That’s why the $400 haircut keeps coming up, Rich said—bringing the $400 haircut up. And beyond that, that was the brilliance of Bush! “Somehow,” Bush was able to convince the public that he was a regular fellow.