For all Chris Matthews’ doughy babble and queasy political analysis, he actually rose above his dependable malaise and momentarily grew a sack. While I’m not sure this particular event gave credence to his show’s name (”Hardball”), I think it at least made the jump from “Uncooked Meatball” to “Nickelodeon Gak Ball.”

Matthew’s guest was conservative Radio Host Kevin James and the subject of the interview was the recent speech made by President Bush in the Israeli Knesset to help mark the nation’s 60th anniversary. The point of contention came in the second half of the speech when Bush stated “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Bush then opened his cheeks and pinched a belittling fudge dragon on the Greatest Generation once again by bringing Hitler into, at best, a remotely-applicable contemporary situation. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939,” Bush continued, “an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The appeasement comment has been viewed as a thinly-veiled attack on Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama who has mentioned a willingness to host talks with unfriendly nations as part of his foreign policy. That particular connotation doesn’t much concern me. Obama is a big boy and can handle himself in the face of a man that begs the invention of time travel to expedite his exit from office. What concerns me is the way the “appeasement” argument has become a meme in media discourse to describe a certain brand of foreign policy that involves anything but carpet bombing without anyone so much as nudging out a clarification of the position. Above all, catch-phrase discourse concerns me.

During Matthews’ interview, James began an impassioned tirade about Obama’s “questionable” Israel policy which segued into the core of Bush’s appeasement jab. After James shouted for several minutes in a voice usually reserved to hark used cars on a commercial for a Podunk Suzuki dealership, Matthews finally stepped in and demanded James tell him what Neville Chamberlain did at the Munich conference in 1939. His answer was…well, he didn’t have an answer. After attempting to sneak off the usually lubed-up Hardball hook by saying “it all goes back to appeasement,” James spent the next several minutes trying to overcome Matthews’ attempts to get him to clarify the events that led to his belief that Obama was resurrecting Chamberlain. The man didn’t know.

It doesn’t surprise me that Kevin James doesn’t know dick about World War II beyond maybe what a M-1 Garand sounds like in a video game. If one bothers to examine 1939 European politics, there is very little connection with Chamberlain’s dealings with Hitler and the current situation in the Middle East. A far more applicable situation (if it had turned out that way) would have occurred in 1991 if George H.W. Bush had given a free pass to Saddam Hussein’s illegal invasion and occupation of Kuwait. If indeed George W. Bush is trying to paint Obama as the mawkish Chamberlain and Ahmadinejad as the aggressive Hitler, the dynamics hardly match up. Iran is clearly up to more than its petulant mauve-blazered president claims, but as irritating as the country is, it has not made such an audacious move as Hitler’s Anchluss, the reason for the Munich Conference that eventually spawned the term “appeasement.” In the event that Iran actually annexed a neighboring territory based on a claim similar to Hitler’s with the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, I highly doubt the global response would be Chamberlain’s.

James’ ignorance and the appeasement analogy itself really play second fiddle to Matthews’ display of rare form on cable news, ie. calling out bullshit. As the analytical trend moves towards two polarized guests vying for a chance to beat their chest, it is even more difficult to separate fact from fiction. It appears as though speaking in a loud voice or using a term that seems weighty in a historical or political context is tantamount to truth, or at the very least, a supported argument. This, for lack of a better word, is bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.

Before penning penny posts, I was a student of history. Though I glutted my time with enough pot and Mario Kart to cast a pallor over the field’s reputation, I nonetheless managed to complete my major with an A average. Why? Because I understood the importance of tying the flexibility of historical writing and presentation with indispensable respect for what is contained in the documents. You can say whatever you want, but if the writings of the contemporary humans in question do not support the statement, you’re writing historical fiction, not history. In the licensed era of enshrined idiocy we find ourselves, historical reductionism of the kind aforementioned and pervasive in popular discourse is particularly dangerous and should not be tolerated. At a time when the world itself potentially wanders on a knife edge, if the adage of “learning from history” is squeezed down to “learning from colloquial history,” it won’t just be the viewers of a ranting televised idiot who suffer.

This is the reason I take offense to the schlock that people like James fart out their palettes on a daily basis on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC and that people like Chris Matthews tolerate with inexcusable frequency. If you hurl historical aphorism without providing context or source material, you are providing legend, not history, vagaries, not analyses. One should fear the day when contextual accuracy becomes the road less traveled. We may already be there.