One of the downsides with dealing with a compliant, supine, and utterly servile media is that on occasion bad things happen by sheer happenstance because you are not prepared for a non-softball question.

To set the stage, Chris Matthews, he of the tingling leg, was interviewing Hillary Clinton on MSNBC. In other words, it was a Democrat apparatchik interviewing a Democrat commissar on a Democrat channel watched by Democrats. It was about as safe an interview as Hillary is ever going to get.

Transcript via Newsbusters:

MATTHEWS: OK, last question, we’re running out of time. I want to try to help you for this audience tonight, our audience, locate yourself politically in this country. Now, we have Trump out there and we have Bernie out here. Now, Bernie calls himself a socialist. Nobody uses a derogatory term anymore. He loves to have that label. He’s never ran as a Democrat, he runs against Democrats up there in Vermont. You’re a Democrat. I would say you’re a pretty typical Democrat, in the traditional Democratic Party. And Humphry and the rest of them. Scoop [Jackson], not even Scoop, I’d say Rondale, you’re somewhere in there. What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat. Is that a question you want to answer or you’d rather not, politically.

CLINTON: Well, you’d have to –

MATTHEWS: Well, see, I’m asking you. You’re a Democrat, he’s a socialist. Would you like somebody to call you a socialist? I wouldn’t like somebody calling me a socialist.

CLINTON: But I’m not one. I mean, I’m not one.

MATTHEWS: What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat. That’s the question.

CLINTON: I can tell you what I am. I am a Progressive Democrat.

MATTHEWS: How is that deferent than a socialist?

CLINTON: I’m a Progressive Democrat who likes to get things done and who believes that we are better off in this country when we’re trying to solve problems together. Getting people to work together. There will always be strong feelings and I respect that, from, you know, the far right, the far left, libertarians, whoever it might be. We need to get people working together. We’ve got to get the economy fixed, we’ve got to get all of our problems, you know, really tackled and that’s what I want to do.

MATTHEWS: I think the difference is, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz wouldn’t answer the question either when I asked her. Because I know politically you have to keep together the center-left and the left has to work together. I know all of that.

As Matthews says, back in July he asked DNC chairthing, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the same question. And he got the same stunned-mullet response.

For all of Matthews’s puzzlement, the answer to his confusion is obvious even to the most casual observer. There is really no difference between the modern Democrat party and the Socialist ruling claque of your typical Third World s***hole.

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