often astonished

----------------------- [excerpt:  Emma, by Jane Austen] -------------------------- "Open the windows!--but surely, Mr. Churchill, nobody would think of opening the windows at Randalls.  Nobody could be so imprudent!  I never heard of such a thing.  Dancing with open windows!--I am sure, neither your father nor Mrs. Weston (poor Miss Taylor that was) would suffer it."

     "Ah! Sir--but a thoughtless young person will sometimes step behind a window-curtain, and throw up a sash, without its being suspected.  I have often known it done myself."

     "Have you indeed, sir?--Bless me!  I never could have supposed it.  But I live out of the world, and am often astonished at what I hear. ..."


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     Words cannot express how much I am going to miss -- am already missing -- Chris Matthews' show, "Hardball."  It's like a death -- or, a grieving process for me.  I think about it at odd moments.  It's bizarre.  I am bereft.


     I think before "Hardball," back in the Nineties, he had another show that was on CNBC -- that's when I started watching him, I'm guessing -- cannot specifically remember...
     But feel like it's been more than 20 years.

          In this century, I even stopped watching him for several years, because even I got exasperated by something he said -- think I wrote about it on this blog, in 09 or 0-10, or whatever...


     But then recently, or a couple of years ago -- I don't know -- I watched Hardball again and I felt like, "Where-you-been-Chris-Matthews-I-love-your-style!!"



     One of the criticisms of his show that you hear most often is, "He interrupts his guests when they're talking!"


     The way I see it, there were two reasons for the interruptions, and they were both good reasons.

1) Guests will just start meandering if you let them keep going, and it was more important to Matthews to pack as much information and as many perspectives into the 40 minutes as possible.  

He wasn't cutting them off in a "mean" way, to shout-down their opinions or points of view -- he was just trying to deliver to me, the viewer, as much info as possible.  I could not take a position against that.

And - 2), Some guests -- more often years ago than now -- would be on the show with the purpose of promoting a book they'd written, and Chris didn't want them to get off on a tangent of selling their book, when his priority is to inform the audience.  Mention your book that's coming out, sure, but don't go on and on, don't use up too much time on it.

He did not even use much time promoting his own books.

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