Just hours after explosions rocked the Boston Marathon on Monday, Chris Matthews speculated, "Normally domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right." He then reconsidered and suggested, "...That’s not a good category, just extremists, let’s call them that." [MP3 audio here [1].]
During live coverage, the Hardball host highlighted a possible explosion at John F. Kennedy's presidential library and thought this could be a personal attack on the Democratic Party: " ...But going after the Kennedy Library, not something at Bunker Hill, not something from the freedom trail or anything that kind of historic, but a modern political figure of the Democratic Party. Does that tell you something?" (Police are now considering the incident at the JFK library to be fire-related.) One can only guess what it tells Chris.
Has Matthews not heard of left-wing domestic terrorists such as William Ayers or the Weather Underground?
[Thanks to the MRC's Jeff Meyer for assistance with the video and transcript.]
A transcript of the April 15 segment is below:
5:17pm ET
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about domestic terrorism as a category. Normally, domestic terrorists, people tend to be on the far right, well that’s not a good category, just extremists, let’s call them that. Do they advertise after they do something like this? Do they try to get credit as a group or do they just hate America so much or its politics or its government that they just want to do the damage, they don't care if they get public credit, if you will?
MICHAEL LEITER: What we'll see over the coming couple hours and days is lots of people taking credit for this. We'll probably have al-Qaeda take credit for it. We'll have domestic terrorists take credit for it. And it will be the responsibility of the FBI and the Boston police to figure out if any of those are actually real cases like Timothy McVeigh destroying the Oklahoma City courthouse federal building; no one took credit for that. So it might be some time or never that someone actually takes credit for this. Lots of people will say they were responsible for it.
MATTHEWS: I was just thinking, again, it's early; it's an early situation, but going after the Kennedy Library, not something at Bunker Hill, not something from the Freedom Trail or anything that kind of historic, but a modern political figure of the Democratic Party. Does that tell you anything?
-- Scott Whitlock is the senior news analyst for the Media Research Center. Click here [2] to follow him on Twitter.