Amy Goodman spoils Chris Matthews' party

MATTHEWS: Why do you think people would go to a story that's so high concept, so easy to understand, rather than a difficult problem that we have in the war in the Middle East and Iraq?
GOODMAN [DemocracyNow.org]: I think people deeply care about what's going on in the Middle East and Iraq. I think we're talking about our sons, our daughters, our mothers, our fathers. I look at young people here and I think about the kids in Qana that were just bombed in this Israeli air strike. It's not enough for Israel to say we're sorry when the cabinet votes to expand the ground offensive. We're talking about living in the 21st century. There has to be an answer other than war. It is only going to make Israel unsafe. It's only going to make the United States unsafe.
MATTHEWS: How does Israel make itself safe when it's got Hezbollah on its border?
GOODMAN: Negotiation is the only answer. It is true for Iraq.
MATTHEWS: What is the base of negotiating with a country...
GOODMAN: ... It's true for Hezbollah. It's true for Gaza and West Bank.
MATTHEWS: OK, Michael, do you want to get in this?
[MICHAEL] SMERCONISH: Yes, how do you negotiate with folks who are going to send missiles in your direction from the middle of a civilian neighborhood? I mean, it's an unfortunate, it's terrible what transpired. But the reality is that there is no other way to combat terrorism. And that's who we're combating.
GOODMAN: You don't negotiate with your friends. You negotiate with your enemies. You come up with viable solutions that both can live with. What we're talking about is not even Hezbollah. We're talking about more than 700 Lebanese civilians, overwhelming civilian. Did they deserve to die over these last few weeks?
MATTHEWS: So as the Katyusha rockets are shot into Haifa, the Israelis should do what, nothing? They should sit on their hands?
GOODMAN: It is terrible that the Katyusha rockets are flying into Israel and it is terrible that Israel is bombing Lebanon. Right now we're talking about civilians. And Israel has the capacity to call for a cease fire and the United States should not be sending bombs to Israel, which is exactly what they did, even over the objections of one of the British cabinet members. They should not be sending bombs to Israel. They should be demanding an immediate cease fire. This is about our national security and it's about the national security of countries all over the Middle East.
[...]
GOODMAN: You said—since you said all the executives are on the top of the Rock. I want to congratulate you, Chris, on 10 years of MSNBC. But I wish standing with you was Phil Donahue. He shouldn't have been fired for expressing an anti-war point of view on the eve of the invasion. His point of view and the people he (inaudible)...
MATTHEWS: I don't know what the reasons were, but I doubt it was that.
GOODMAN: Well, we have the NBC memo that was a secret memo that came out that said they didn't want him to be the face of this network, an anti-war face at a time when the other networks were waving the flag.
(CROSSTALK)
[...]
MATTHEWS: Well, if being against the war was a problem here, I would have been out of here about four years ago, because I've been against this war from day one, and that didn't cost me my job.
GOODMAN: I congratulate you, Chris...
MATTHEWS: So let me just say, they're not against anti-war people. But there's so much conservative tendencies in corporate America. You know that.

{links & emphasis added by me}

Go Amy! Full transcript available at DemocracyNow.org.
Footnote: Jim Sheridan, the British cabinet minister who objected to the US using UK airports on their way to the Middle East has now resigned in protest.