Media Matters for America: That was then ... Matthews lauded "experience" of Bush's Cabinet picks in 2001, but says Obama's selection of prior administration vets is "crap"
Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser
On the November 18 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, amid reports that President-elect Barack Obama has decided to nominate Clinton Justice Department veteran Eric Holder to be attorney general, host Chris Matthews said, "This is what you do when you don't have elections. You simply promote the people ... who had the deputy jobs. You could do this in any bureaucratic state, you could do it in the old Soviet Union. ... You don't need elections for this crap."
But in 2001, responding to then President-elect George W. Bush's selection to his cabinet of veterans of prior administrations, Matthews offered a very different assessment of such actions. Purporting to quote "an NBC driver" on the January 3, 2001, edition of Hardball, Matthews said the driver, a Vietnam veteran, is "like a lot of guys you meet," and said, "They want guys who've been around and survived." Matthews then said of then-President elect George W. Bush's Cabinet picks: "You've got it in this Cabinet. There's some real heavyweights in terms of experience."
At the time, Bush had nominated Donald Rumsfeld to be secretary of defense, the same position he held under President Ford, and Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush, to be secretary of state. He had also named Dick Cheney, defense secretary under President George H.W. Bush, to be his running mate.
While Matthews raised the question of whether, in his Cabinet picks, Bush "risked being overwhelmed by their maturity and veteran status," he did not suggest that Bush was mimicking "the old Soviet Union" in selecting people who had served in previous administrations....
http://mediamatters.org/items/200811180018?f=h_latest
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