MS(RNC)

The RNC has attacked Chris Matthews with this video for his declaration on Imus this morning that Cheney was clearly misleading when he said he had never said anything connecting Iraq to the attacks on 9/11. However, they should have been watching last night, when Matthews and company were the only ones declaring outright that Cheney had "obliterated" Edwards. Even Fox presented a more balanced verdict.

The real question is why MSNBC was so skewed towards Cheney in their post-debate analysis. Diane posted Boehlert's article from Salon on this subject. Here's my own little conspiracy theory.

After the first presidential debate, everyone, including Matthews and Co., slammed the President for a particularly poor debate performance. The trouble is, MSNBC has clearly made a real attempt to outfox Fox, especially in their late night shows. (Tonight, for example, they had Buchanan hosting the Scarborough show with Ann Coulter as his guest to talk about the debate.) They presume that large numbers of their viewers are conservative and Scarborough himself even admitted to getting "flayed...alive for giving the debate to Kerry last week."

They also may have known that the debate was likely to be watched by more Republicans than Democrats, as ABC proved in their post-debate poll and the huge ratings for Fox News seem to confirm, and that they could ill afford to offer anything but the highest praise for Cheney. Competitiveness being what it is in the cable news industry, it probably wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume that panel guests were essentially told, unless Cheney clearly falls on his face, we're calling this a win for him. Fineman and Mitchell were only too happy to play along.