Maddow/Matthews on appeasement flap

The gift that keeps on giving. Maddows guest hosted Countdown last Friday, and had Matthews on to talk about the destructive nature of talking point-driven political culture, in which people mouth magic words to stigmatize their opponents and drive them out of the public square. C&L has the video:

MADDOW: Do you think this is something new? Do you think this is something specific to our current, contemporaneous politics that we have these sort of buzzwords and bumper sticker slogans, whether it’s ‘appeasement,’ or ‘fight over there so we don’t fight them here’ or ‘they hate our freedom,’ any of these terms. Are they designed to be repeated and not to be interrogated?

MATTHEWS: Well, just look at the way people are basically exterminated or tried to be exterminated. Bill Maher makes a comment –which may not have been the right comment–but he was making a point he was trying to make, about stand back weaponry compared to people killing themselves. You can argue about the niceties of that. The Dixie Chicks say something about the war—and they shouldn’t have said it overseas, but they said it. The shutting up of opposition is critical to running a country in an undemocratic way, let’s put it that way. And so you have buzzwords like ‘appeasers’ or ‘cut and run’ and they’re used over and over again by the most mindless people. The trouble with them is they tend to work. The dittoheads can use them. Anyone can use them and they seem to have the same effect. They cause people to run from criticism.