[Posted by WLS]

Jack Shafer has a hit-piece today in Slate on Chris Matthews getting a lifetime achievement award from the Churchill Centre.

Much of the info may be well known to others, and I knew some of it.  But I had never before seen the passage Shafer quotes from the book Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants by Vanity Fair contributor James Wolcott:

Matthews manages to outrace his contradictory statements by blustering so many excitable things so fast and so often that pinning down the discrepancies is like trying to grab a gust of wind by the tail. He isn’t a cynical dissembler. He seems to suffer from some pundit variant of short-term memory loss. Each day on earth erases the days before. He says what he believes and believes what he says, and has the liberating advantage of always working from a blank sheet.

I’m not a big fan of Wolcott’s stuff in VF, but that is a great line about Matthews. 

The poor guy is getting some simple award from an outfit that few have even heard of, and even fewer will remember the award.  But Shafer sees it as an excuse to hand him from a yardarm.