St. Joe Honors Matthews? Outrageous!

From Frank Diamond in The Bulletin:
Chris Matthews? You want to bestow an honorary degree on Mr. Matthews, St. Joe’s?
What diversity-addled ditherer over in humanities stuffed that idea into the suggestion box? And what defender of politically correct speech (and nothing but politically correct speech) of an administrator agreed? Did something worm its way into the drinking water out on City Line Avenue?
I got no response from school officials as of the filing of this column so I have to assume that the announcement last week that St. Joseph’s University plans to fete Mr. Matthews at its 2009 commencement ceremonies wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.
Mr. Matthews hosts the fast-tanking MSNBC gabfest, “Hardball.” Of course, “host” doesn’t quite describe Mr. Matthews’s act. He’s more a vaudevillian, which most readers have never actually witnessed since Vaudeville died about the time talkies hit the theaters.
Picture Mr. Matthews as an old, old, old very old comedian whose timing left him a long, long, long, very long time ago and whose audience is really just there to see the dancing girls anyway. Picture him sporting a red rubber nose and the moniker “Jo-Jo the Journalist.” Picture him pompous, by all means since pomposity makes the silly look even sillier. Let Jo-Jo weigh in on matters of which he has no true understanding. That’s “Hardball.” I can’t wait for the series finale, when a big hook appears and drags Mr. Matthews off the stage.

Couldn’t St. Joe’s let this ratings dog lie? Why would you want the star of one of the least viewed shows on television to grace your commencement ceremonies? Were the hosts on the Food Network busy that day?
There are more than just common-sense reasons why Mr. Matthews should not be honored by a Catholic university. He is a well-know abortion rights advocate. It’s as if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were asked to address the Israeli Knesset. (“Thank you! What a great crowd! I almost don’t want to wipe you off the face of the earth anymore!”) It’s as if the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan were toasted by the NAACP.
Hello? Anybody home there at St. Joe’s?
Why must anyone have to say to officials of an institution of higher learning that what people think matters? The last I looked, Catholicism teaches that abortion is murder. Therefore, Mr. Matthews is an abettor of genocide — when he’s not doing the soft-shoe and spritzing seltzer water at the audience.
Take away that major obstacle and the desire to honor this narrow-sighted coot still makes no sense. If you wanted to celebrate a washed-up national joke, a cartoon caricature of a political thinker, a man who reached the apex of his social relevance years ago, a public figure with roots squarely planted in the vaudevillian tradition, than why not honor Mr. Magoo?
Photo credit: patdollard.com