From The Baltimore Sun
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

Don’t read this column yet.

First, I want you to do something. Google “Chris Matthews + Kevin James.” This will bring up video of the latter, a conservative Los Angeles radio pundit, being questioned by the former on MSNBC’s Hardball. You “must” see this video.

For the Internet deprived, here’s a recap: Mr. James goes on Hardball to comment on a speech President Bush gave before the Israeli Knesset in which he accused unnamed politicians – read: Sen. Barack Obama – of a policy of appeasement toward terrorists. Mr. Bush evoked the memory of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister whose attempted appeasement of Adolf Hitler made him one of the more thoroughly discredited figures of the 20th century.

Mr. James goes off like fireworks, blasting Mr. Obama’s willingness to talk to the nation’s enemies and accusing him of policies detrimental to Israel. And Mr. Matthews asks him a simple question: What did Mr. Chamberlain do? You’re defending a speech that equates Mr. Obama with him, so what was his sin?

Mr. James couldn’t answer. He could bluster, sputter and spread fertilizer like a gardener, but he couldn’t answer. This became painfully obvious each time Mr. Matthews doggedly repeated the question.

What Mr. Chamberlain did – he gave Hitler a chunk of Czechoslovakia in exchange for what he thought was “peace in our time” – is not some Jeopardy! obscurity. It is, rather, a pivot on which turned perhaps the bloodiest tragedy in human history. Yet Kevin James knows nothing about it.

If anything more aptly symbolizes the regression of conservatism since the age of Ronald Reagan, I am not aware of it.

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