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You've just got to love this framing for Chris Matthews' first panel segment on his weekend bobble head show. Does President Obama have the "bedside manners" to tell the left they're not going to get a public option? How about this one instead Chris? Does President Obama have the "bedside manners" to tell anyone who wants to filibuster a public option to break out the cots and the Depends? How's that for a different lead in to this segment Chris? In case you didn't notice, it takes 51 votes to get something passed in the United States Senate, not 60. It's time for the Democrats to quit allowing these silent filibusters.

INTRO: Bedside manners--the time is coming when our Democratic President will have to break the bad news to his liberal supporters and have to tell them that they can't get the kind of health care bill on which they have set their hearts. Does he have the strong bedside manner to give them the bad news and still keep their spirits up?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Boy, Dan, this is a rock and a hard place. The liberals in the Congress are pushing and pushing, and the president has to face reality. He needs 60 senators, 218 members of the Congress.

Mr. DAN RATHER: Uh-huh.

MATTHEWS: Can both meet peacefully?

Mr. RATHER: No. The president isn't going to get a--the--what's been described as a public option. He may get something close to that, something he can camouflage up as if--he isn't going to get it. And this is going to take a long time, Chris. I wouldn't be surprised if we aren't talking about this same subject late into December. And there is the question of public fatigue. I think he will get a bill, I think it will be progress along the lines of health care reform, but he's going to need a health care reform number two. And whether he can get that in an election year of 2010 is a real open question.

MATTHEWS: Kelly, you cover it all the time, and my question is, can you square a circle? You've got people on the Republican side now, Olympia Snowe, who's aboard so far. Maybe Susan Collins, the other senator from Maine. Maybe, maybe. But you've also got Joe Lieberman of Connecticut saying, `I'm here for the--for the insurance industry of Hartford. I'm not going to be for this bill as it stands.'

Ms. KELLY O'DONNELL: Well, getting all the Democrats will be tough if you're talking about a government insurance plan. That is going to be difficult because not only Joe Lieberman, but there are a number of moderates. When you're talking about Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins, the Republican ladies of Maine who get a lot of attention, they're kind of--they're using their influence really effectively right now. They still can have a phone call with the president, a one-on-one meeting with the president, which most Republicans don't have any chance of having, and they're still also talking to Republicans, expressing concerns about what it would cost, how big the change would be, could government be competent to have this kind of a program. So they're keeping the conversation going. In the end you could see Snowe, you could see Collins joining on, but that might be crucial to get to 60 because you may lose some of the moderate Democrats.

MATTHEWS: Right. Well, that's what I don't get here. Helene, jump in here. I mean, you cover the White House. How in the world does this president deliver health care if the price is a public option, when so many people who will have to vote for this to pass are against it? I don't see how it works.

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So Tweety, all worked up about next year's mid-term elections, asks his panelon this week's "Chris Matthews Show" how many House seats will the Dems lose in the upcoming election and quotes some of Charlie Cook's predictions.

He blames high unemployment and healthcare reform for impending losses, and then notes how many seats Reagan lost and how many Clinton lost. What it's going to be like "after next November when the Democrats have to pay the piper for high unemployment, for questions - in fact, anger that you've all expressed in the last section about the healthcare bill and all those kinds of problems?"

TIME editor Richard Stengel praises Rahm Emanuel, saying how brilliant it was that Rahm put Democratic conservatives in conservative districts. (Buttering up the chief of staff for access, Richard?)

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker says House Democrats are concerned because they "walked the plank for Nancy Pelosi on cap-and-trade and now they've got to go with health care, the people are raising Cain about it at home, and so they're in a terrible bind and yes, they want to be team players so I think you're going to see a lot of fallout come this term."

Matthews says any House Democrat who puts their "yea" on health care reform "has got to be thinking 'I'm a target'".

CNBC's Trish Regan says that's because health care reform is an unpopular program (well, Trish, I'm guessing it is among your constituency, but there's a lot more of us than there are of them) and claims that voters are "more worried about spending and the deficit" and says there's a feeling their politicians are not doing what they want.

She says President Obama needs to make this health care program more popular, and Matthews agrees.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Wall Street beat reporter for the New York Times, says "People are voting with their wallets next time. That's what this is. This is all about 'am I richer, am I poorer' and you know, everybody remembers how rich they were - ah, I don't know how rich they were, but only a year or two ago and unless Obama can get Democrats and get us back to that place next summer, I think it's going to be a tough road."

Matthews says, So the Republicans are promising to get it back for you?

Sorkin: Absolutely.

Then Parker add this final dollop of smug Villager "wisdom."

"There was never a constituency for health care. Let's remember that. When you have eighty five percent of Americans who are pretty satisfied with their policies, their insurance coverage and their health care, where was this constituency that we have to overhaul the system? It never was there."

Whoa, Nellie! Are you kidding me? Hey Kath, did you happen to notice that health care was the main issue in last year's election? Have you been reading all those health-care sob stories on the front page of your own paper? Can't wait until your ass-kissing paper closes and you're out on the street, hustling freelance work to cover your bills. Imagine, life where you can't afford a pedicure!

Matthews agrees. "Right. And I see trouble for the Democrats."

I'm going to make a different prediction. If the Democrats pass healthcare reform with a real public option, Democratic popularity will grow and we'll do well in the next election, with minimal losses.

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It was somewhat gratifying to see Chris Matthews' right-leaning panel on his Sunday show -- which was, as expected, eager to deny the role of racism in the ugly animus that's been directed at Barack Obama -- at least admit the truth:

David Brooks: What Rush and Glenn Beck are doing is race-baiting. 100 percent. That's race-baiting.

...

Kathleen Parker: What Rush Limbaugh and Beck did in those two clips is to empower racists.

But it was even more interesting to watch Brooks in particular somehow manage to stumble upon the core of the problem:

Matthews: Would the White House like the leaders of both parties to say, 'Cool it'?

Brooks: Well, I think they would. First, I think Father Coughlin was objecting to FDR, and he -- that's what we're seeing, Father Coughlin, that's what these guys are --

Matthews: And he was far right.

Brooks: He was far right. The White House understands, you've got 10 percent of the country over here on the wacky right, 10 percent on the wacky left, that's not what they can pay attention to. And they're not going to pay attention to it. They're sticking with the independents -- that's what the health care, why it's tending toward the center.

The one danger -- the main danger of all this, the Glenn and the Rush and all that -- they're not going to take over the country. But they are taking over the Republican Party.

And so if the Republican Party is sane, they will say no to these people. But every single elected leader in the Republican Party is afraid to take on Rush and Glenn Beck.

Brooks' percentages are off -- it's more like about 5 percent on the left and 30 percent on the right side, and this latter fact is actually what he identifies as the problem; the right has been so overwhelmed by its wingnutty elements that they have largely taken over the GOP at this juncture in time. And there's no prospect of the David Brookses ever getting it back -- in no small part because they refuse to acknowledge the magnitude of what they're up against.

But at least they recognize the problem. That's a start.

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Chris Matthews was off this week with Norah O'Donnell filling in so there is one good thing I can say about this week's show. None of the guests were interrupted or talked over. That said, check out this ridiculous "Matthews Meter" question. And six of their panelists thought the venom was partly Obama's fault, including Howard Fineman.

Once again driftglass nails this one in his post Sunday Morning Comin' Down -- "The Tell-Tweety Heart" (warning, not safe for work):

Epilogue:

While six of the "journalists" who make up the "Matthew's Meter" say, yes, the anti-Obama hatred was unavoidable, six say Obama partly brought it on himself.

Fineman: He didn’t talk to Main Street. He needs to spend every minute of every day constantly reassure crazy people on the Right that he doesn’t want to abort Sarah Palin's baby and shoot grandma in the head or turn Murrica into a Franco-Islamic Communist Caliphate. This is perhaps unfair, but after all, he is Black.

Jokeline: I was at some town meetings this summer, most recently in Arkansas. And this is an awful lot about race. And not just because of Obama’s name or skin color. If you’re working class white, you’re seeing Latinos and Asians.

driftglass: And bears. Oh my.

But why is this coming up now during a health care debate?

Jokeline: Because they’re being egged on by demagogues in the Republican Party. By Boss Rush Limbaugh. And I call him The Boss, because there is not a single, Republican elected official who is willing to call him out on his lies.

Cooper: Because there are a lot of White people – particularly in the South – who have just lost their s#%t over a Black man being President.

Fineman: Let me repeat it in case I was not condescending enough the first time – this White House needs to constantly kiss wingnut ass every way they can think of. Maybe it’s unfair, but after all, he is Black. Also he was forced to behave like a filthy, filthy Liberal to save the economy from crashing and burning, and the doublewide trailer crowd who his policies probably saved from living in refrigerator boxes and begging for nickels on freeway overpasses will never forgive him for it.

There's lots more at driftie's place. Go on over there and check out the entire post. I don't want to give too much of it away to spoil the fun, but I thought it was priceless.

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Chris Matthews seems to think that bloggers don’t do any fact checking, and that we’re going to lose that if the newspaper industry goes out of business. While it’s true that beat reporters and those doing the footwork out there are sorely needed, to say that bloggers don’t fact check is just a cheap shot at the on line community that he and his ilk have such disdain for, probably because we’re the main ones fact checking the likes of him.

What Matthews fails to note here is why the industry is in such bad shape. The Economist lays out some of the problems in their article Who Killed the Newspaper.

Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

Ironically we see Bob Woodward saying journalism lives on after playing stenographer for the Bush crowd to get some books sold rather than reporting on what he found out. And he holds up Tina Brown’s operation at The Daily Beast as a business model for making money on line and some hope for journalism's future.

Just how different would this conversation have been with a completely different panel? The viewers might have learned something had it been our own Dave Neiwert and Susie Madrak who’ve worked in the newspaper industry and turned to blogging instead, and Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo and Eric Boehlert from Media Matters, who’s sites look more like the future of journalism to me.

When the fourth estate doesn't do its job, people are going to turn to other sources that will. Something that seems to completely elude Chris Matthews and his panel here.

Another thing Matthews fails to note is that most bloggers who use other people’s reporting link back to that material and allow their readers to evaluate their assertions for themselves. We are not just taking stenography from press releases or other people’s reporting. And when we get something wrong, there’s generally a swift retraction. Something you cannot say for too many in our “mainstream media” who tend to circle the wagons rather than admit mistakes. And while Joe Klein is claiming that his commenters “fact check” him, just how many of those comments does he actually read?

Transcript below the fold.

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I love navel-gazing on the part of the media, where they decide collectively that they were right to create a meme which takes over the media. On this weekend's The Chris Matthews Show, pundits Howard Fineman, Michael Duffy and Ceci Connolly agree that it was appropriate for them to ask President Obama about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., because "it's an important issue."

MATTHEWS: It’s all about identity politics again, and at the same time these people on the far, far right are talking about whether he’s a citizen or not, this comes up.

DUFFY: And when the White House Press Secretary calls it a ‘distraction’, you know it was a mistake. And his mistake was pretty simple, which was that he didn’t really have all the facts, and was not in a position to talk about it. He was right to take it up, because it is an issue that is important, and it’s one in which he is completely versed, and you can see from the rest of his statement, that he knows exactly what to say. But I also think it came at the end of that press conference, which was about a completely different subject, and I think he was a little punchy by then. He was talking about you know what would happen to him in the White House, and it was a joke and he kind of lost the seriousness of the moment and I think got off track…

MATTHEWS: Yeah, I agree with that, the moment was important. I think he was a little angry, a little fatigued. These guys get up at five in the morning and this was eight at night. Is this going to be around a while?

Get the meme? Obama the angry black man being asked to speak on behalf of the entire African American community--and you know he is versed in this. Howard Fineman sort of treads along the edges of why even asking Obama his opinion of Gates' arrest was racist (because, honestly, can you imagine the media doing this to President McCain, had he won? I don't think so), without fully realizing it:

FINEMAN: ...(T)he progress that he made—the Sotomayor nomination—she did convince people, by her bearing, by her knowledge, by her experience, that she was eminently qualified and in that sense, was beyond this. Both of her race, but beyond it. This is not what Barack Obama’s political advisors wanted him to be doing up there. Because it turns it into a racial conversation, per se, at a time when he’s being president of all the country. And trying to be president of all the country and this feeds into the narrative of what I call the RNC—the Rush Newt Cheney RNC—which is all about fear, accusation and division. Barack Obama as president has to be about national unity.

Apparently to Howard, Barack Obama has been doing a good job up until this point of not making white Americans realize that he's African American and making them feel comfortable with other people of color. But now, Howard's worried that Obama has lost his white constituency:

FINEMAN: He went to great lengths as a candidate, to say that he could be president of all America. He understood all the different cultures and wanted to learn about all the different cultures of America. This kind of thing sets him back with working class whites.

Sigh. Can I remind you bobbleheads that it was YOU collectively that raised this subject? This was a local issue, albeit with a semi-famous person involved. This is not a federal issue, nor did it need to be addressed by the President of the United States, especially since the only justification for it is that Obama and Gates outwardly share a skin color (although both are of mixed-race heritage). Isn't it reasonable to assume that the President of the United States has enough on his plate without being thrust the mantle of spokesman for the entire African American community and trying to make white people more comfortable with the age-old issue of racial profiling?

As far as Gates is concerned, there was no clear cut right or wrong on his arrest; both sides escalated the situation beyond where it should have gone. But in terms of pulling Barack Obama into the debate and letting it take over the news cycles for days and days when very real issues (um Afghanistan, any one? Health care reform? The economy? Any of those ring a bell?) are left undiscussed is simply giving red meat to the right wingers eager to derail any actual progress in this country. And the responsibility for that falls on bobbleheads like these clowns, not Obama.

Transcripts below the fold

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"President" Newt Gingrich on Da Ali G Show

Oh look, President Newt Gingrich is on the Sunday shows. Again. Gosh, I'm so glad that the media is around to tell us just who embodies the change for which we voted. And looking around, it's no better on any other show: former Bush attorney Ed Gillespie on This Week, former governor Mitt Romney on Fox News and every single milquetoasty DINO booked (I'm looking at you, Feinstein and Specter) is paired with a camera-hogging, sound-byte ready (if fact-negligible) Republican like John Kyl, Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham. Hello: reality-based community to media--it's 2009, not 2000. Catch the hell up already.

ABC's "This Week" - Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and John Cornyn, R-Texas; Ed Gillespie, former Bush White House counselor.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Pre-empted for the French Open.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Gloria Borger, Dan Rather, John Heilemann, Katty Kay. Topics: Has President Obama solidified a lasting majority for the Democratic Party? How should Republicans respond to Obama, and who are their promising stars? Meter questions: Will Senate Republicans attack Sonia Sotomayor as a liberal or show deference to her? YES: 10 NO: 2; Is Obama winning the national security policy debate with Cheney? YES: 11 No: 1.

CNN's "State of the Union/Reliable Sources" - Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; Gillespie; Sameh Shoukry, Egypt's ambassador to the U.S.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - In a speech in Cairo this Thursday, President Obama called for a "new beginning" for relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Fareed brings together a panel of experts from around the Muslim world and the region to react to and analyze the speech...and what it means for U.S./Arab relations. Plus, author Michael Lewis on the economic crisis and the future of Wall Street.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

Oasis -- Don't Look Back In Anger

It's more of the Republican Legacy Tour this Sunday. The main event will be beleaguered former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Face The Nation. He's getting it from all sides: the left, unwilling to forgive him for his lies in getting us into war and now the R(ush) N(ewt) C(heney) Party, unhappy with his recent honesty regarding the health of his own party. And the man who puts the N(ewt) in RNC will be on Meet The Press, to continue to show that despite the fact that he was forced to leave Congress in disgrace for his own hypocrisy years ago, he's the best they have to be the "new" face of change for the Republican Party. And of course, the compliant media keeps their focus on the GOP for yet another week.

ABC's "This Week" - Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell; author Alvin Poussaint.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Michael Duffy, Katty Kay, Jennifer Loven, David Ignatius. Topics: Will the right or the left be a bigger thorn for Obama on national security? Has Obama already begun his reelection campaign with travel to red states? Meter Questions: Is Obama winning the national security policy debate with Cheney? YES: 11 NO: 1; Can Obama keep Pakistan's government in power? YES: 2 No: 10.

CNN's "State of the Unionk/Reliable Sources" - Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Fareed sits down with Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in an exclusive interview. Musharraf is the guest for the hour and they discuss his years in power and resignation, Pakistan's deadly struggle against the Taliban, strained relations between India and Pakistan, and Benazir Bhutto's death.

"Fox News Sunday" - Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

So, what's catching your eye this morning?

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The topic of these stress tests was discussed on Bill Moyers Journal this past Friday in one of the best interviews I've seen about how to get us out of this financial abyss we're in which I posted the other day at Video Cafe but here's the video again for anyone that didn't watch it already. The transcript and links to Bill Moyers are available in that post as well.

Andrew Sullivan is a bit more confident than Johnson that the banks will be nationalized and feels that the stress tests will be used as a means to justify it to the public.

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After watching the interview on Bill Moyers Journal with Simon Johnson, I hope he's right. As covered by TPM, it looks like even Lindsey Graham agrees that nationalization may be necessary.

One thing that bears noting is just what exactly Simon Johnson envisioned as to what would happen if this takes place. From the transcript of the Bill Moyers Journal interview:

Johnson: So you're looking at how the bank's balance sheets will look under stress. And then you say to them, "This is our assessment of the amount of capital you need to cover your losses, and to stay in business, and be able to make loans, through what appears to be a severe recession."

And, as the president said, we may lose a decade. So we've got to be very hard headed, and all the officials forecasters are still too optimistic on that. This is the amount of capital you need. Now you have a month, or two, to raise this amount of capital privately.

And when this was done in Sweden, by the way, in the early 1990s, they did it to three big banks. One of the three was able to go to its shareholders, raise a lot more capital, and stay in business as a private bank, same shareholders. That's an option. Totally fine. However, the ones that can't raise the capital are in violation of the terms of their banking license, if you like.

We have no problem in this country shutting down small banks. In fact, the FDIC is world class at shutting down and managing the handover of deposits, for example, from small banks. They managed IndyMac, the closure of IndyMac, beautifully. People didn't lose touch with their money for even a moment. But they can't do it to big banks, because they don't have the political power. Nobody has the political will to do it.

So you need to take an FDIC-type process. You scale it up. You say, "You haven't raised the capital privately. The government is taking over your bank. You guys are out of business. Your bonuses are wiped out. Your golden parachutes are gone." Okay? Because the bank has failed.

This is a government-supervised bankruptcy process. It's called, in the terminology of the business, it's called an intervention. The bank is intervened. You don't go into Chapter 11 because in that's too messy. Too complicated. There's an intervention, you lose the right to operate as a bank. The FDIC takes you over. I think we agree, everyone agrees, we don't want the government to run banks in this country.

So who's speaking out against nationalization? Chuck Schumer. I know everyone's shocked, right? Another corporate Democrat taking Wall Street's money and he's against it. It seems Jane Hamsher has taken notice of the Johnson inteview on Bill Moyers and Schumer's statements on This Week as well and has more on the topic here: Who Does Chuck Schumer Represent, You or the Banks?

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During a discussion on how the stimulus bill got passed where Chris Matthews wants to frame the discussion on whether there was a "win" or a "loss" for President Obama, Andrew Sullivan calls out the GOP for their hyprocrisy on when they're concerned about fiscal responsibility.

Matthews: The Republicans have taken a rather unusual position here. Well maybe not unusual but certainly a stark one Andrew. They're voting "No". That's a bet.

Sullivan: They're also saying "We are the party of fiscal conservatism". Now they managed....

Matthews: Since when though?

Sullivan: I think like ten minutes ago. I mean they spent for future debt of this country, they added thirty trillion dollars in a period of boom. We are now in the swiftest down turn in employment in decades and they're quibbling over something like four hundred billion dollars worth of spending. It doesn't make any sense. The hyprocrisy of these people, their ability to turn on a dime and not even acknowledge their own responsibility. If they hadn't spent the amount they spent in the last eight years we wouldn't have this crisis in the sense we'd have much more leeway to spend our way out a recession.

The one moment you don't want to be a fiscal conservative is when the global economy is headed down into a down draft. And yet that's the one moment these Republicans pick to allegedly stand up for their principles. It's insane I think and frankly all these news cycle spins, that's the old politics. The new politics is we're in a terrible economic crisis. Have we done enough to get ourselves out of it?

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From the Chris Matthews Show, Oct. 19, 2008.

Chris asks his panel of Kathleen Parker, Andrew Sullivan, Katy Kay and Mark Whitaker if the Republican party is out of ideas.

Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece this week exploring how the concept of "balance" corrupts any sense of honest media analysis. Case in point: The Washington Post's Dan Balz trying to equate Barack Obama's attacks ("erratic","uncertain","lurching") to John McCain's attacks ("he's an untrustworthy, un-American terrorist sympathizer").

Balz’s article is about the increasing use of “character attacks” in the presidential race, and rather than state the truth — that the McCain/Palin ticket is now relying almost exclusively on some of the ugliest and most outright dangerous character smears seen in a modern presidential election — Balz instead pretends that this is a phenomenon of which both sides are guilty in equal measure.

This clip from the Chris Matthews Show is yet another fascinating example. Tweety, Howard Fineman, Gloria Borger, David Ignatius, and Cynthia Tucker simply can't bring themselves to state the obvious.

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In a rational world, a legitimate attack on your opponent's unsteady and erratic leadership during times of crisis is light years away from the vicious, dangerous types of character assaults we're hearing from the McCain camp. I mean think about it: They're not even trying to sell policy anymore. Instead, they're linking the terms "Barack Hussein Obama" and "terrorist" to the point where John McCain is forced to remind his traveling lynch mob that Obama is not, in fact, a "scary Arab." And when he does, he gets viciously booed.

We shouldn't underestimate the significance of John Lewis' recent remarks. There's a reason McCain told Rick Warren that he's one of the wisest people he knows.

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John McCain's campaign is struggling, and this was a particularly hard week for them.  But never fear, McCain's Media is here to spin this as well as possible for the MaverickMan.  After all, there's no need for them to go over and over ad nauseam all of McCain's verbal gaffes from this week.  They did that during the Democratic primary when they talked about Clinton's Bosnia story and Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright for weeks on end. It's so done. Let's instead focus on him bringing in new staff.  But don't look too hard at the fact that he's brought in the people from Karl Rove's shop that destroyed his candidacy in 2000, because that might indicate some sort of desperation for the dirty politics that Rove is so famous for using.  So let's invent a more mild concern, like a messy desk analogy for his management style.  And we all know that can be turned around to be a positive, since Nixon had a neat desk.  But above all, let's ask if this is a fair question to evaluate a supposed McCain presidency.

MATTHEWS: NY Times reporter Adam Nagourney wrote this week that quote even former McCain associates think voters now might be getting an early glimpse of the messy, unstructured way in which McCain and his White House might be managed. Howard, is this a fair problem for people to be worried about, staff shakeups, firing people, layering people, bringing in new bosses to run the campaign?

FINEMAN: Well, John McCain is not a systems thinker. He's a leader by personal will and force of personality. He's gathered a sort of constellation of people around him. Nobody ever actually leaves the orbit, it's just different planets fly closer at different times.

MATTHEWS: Well, who are these former staffers that keep dumping on him in the NY Times?

FINEMAN: There are a couple who have escaped...who had escaped gravitational pull.

 McCain Media, hard at work to make you not think at all.