Anyone of any prominence threatening the nut-right’s caricature of President Obama as a far-left socialist kinda’ guy in an election year can certainly be expected to get kicked around a bit by Newsbusters. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said President Obama’s speech, last night, to the Democratic National Convention demonstrated that the Democrats “are not a left-wing party,” but are, instead, a “center-left” one, and that Obama is “something of a moderate, not a lefty here–certainly not a socialist…” For Matt Vespa, them’s fightin’ words, but his attempted take-down of Matthews, today, doesn’t have a lot of fight in it.

Chris Matthews must be living in an alternate reality. The stimulus, ObamaCare, the autoworkers union bailout, the green energy executive order, the watered-down Dream Act enacted by presidential fiat weren’t actions of limited government.

In this reality, it’s true that every Republican in the U.S. House and all but three Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted against the Obama stimulus package. It’s also true that, immediately after the vote, most of those same conservative Republicans began demanding a piece of the pie go to their states and districts, and, having voted “no,” returned home to take credit for all the money the stimulus was bringing in. Of 219 Republican members of congress at the time, 114 of them–over half the delegation–did this little dance. Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan was among them; in a story that received virtually no coverage in the corporate press that so regularly fawns over him, he lobbied the government for millions of dollars for a pair of companies in his home state.[1] Obama’s support for the stimulus only makes him some uber-leftist in a world in which conservative Republicans are, as well.

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