Thursday January 31 - Msnbc - Hardball With Chris Matthews

MATTHEWS: You kissed off the Hispanic vote, Shrummie. It was your fault. SHRUM: No. You know what? Hispanic relations between Anglos and Hispanics. I received with these folks on that one. Anyway, thanks, Bob Shrum. Thank you, Michael Steele. MATTHEWS: -- a real deal with right here. All the ladies and men come out. Bradley Cooper coming here. Cooper, is coming to take a seat proper where Michael Steele is sitting. That is HARDBALL, the place for politics. Bradley Cooper is coming to HARDBALL right now. MATTHEWS: Again to my sweet spot, Philadelphia, my hometown. BRADLEY COOPER AS PAT SOLATANO: I already looked all over there. UNIDENTIFIED Feminine: It`s somewhere! COOPER: It`s not right here, mom. UNIDENTIFIED Feminine: Just calm down. COOPER: I`m not calming down. All people can get up. I`m not ashamed of it. UNIDENTIFIED Female: Cease it! COOPER: Let the whole neighborhood get up. UNIDENTIFIED Female: Cease it, cease it. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What`s going on? UNIDENTIFIED Feminine: Stop it! There are plenty of very able individuals in Opus Dei. The spokesman for the pope, for the Vatican, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who's superb at what he does, is a member of Opus Dei. DIONNE: And I feel that‘s a part of the fear. And it isn't as secret because it was. Once more, I agree with the monsignor on that. MATTHEWS: Are they an influential faction, E.J.? MATTHEWS: Are they an influential faction in choosing the following pope? But I think you will have—not to turn the entire world into polarized America, God help us—but I believe you'll have a specific amount of polarization around Opus Dei. For example, the cardinal from Milan that you talked about, who is near Opus Dei, his predecessor, Cardinal Montini, who's a extra liberal Catholic, is alleged, based on the scuttlebutt, not to need his successor to be pope. Now, provided that these guys aren‘t supposed to leak, beneath penalty of eternal damnation, perhaps we will never know that for certain, but that‘s the type of discuss you are hearing.

We‘ll be proper again. MATTHEWS: Welcome again to this special version of HARDBALL on the catastrophic injury left within the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Tonight, there isn't a water to drink, no food and no electricity. So, how safe is the South going to be after darkish tonight? Can the police and National Guardsmen keep order, regulation and order, and catch the looters if they have to? NBC‘s Don Teague is in Metairie, Louisiana, just exterior New Orleans. Don, are the police and the Nationwide Guards folks letting individuals loot, as we saw in front of that Walgreens a couple moments ago? DON TEAGUE, NBC CORRESPONDENT: Effectively, I haven‘t seen any situations where there was looting going on and there have been authorities of any sort standing by watching it. I'll give an example. We were driving by way of an space earlier at present in Kenner and we rolled up on a pawn store that was on hearth. It had simply began. As if we‘d never come? ROBINSON: Sure. And that‘s the same as as we speak. MATTHEWS: So, you're skeptical? ROBINSON: I am skeptical. I'm skeptical. I believe it would look higher in three years however I‘m undecided it‘ll be higher in three years. MATTHEWS: Let me go to the next—so we're shifting along in my next query. Will the Republican demand some kind of aster pull-out? Will they bounce to the president‘s left on this surprisingly? HOWARD FINEMAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, having talked to a few of them and having talked to White House people—first of all, the White Home people are anticipating the Republicans to attack from both sides. FINEMAN: And I think that‘s right primarily based on the folks I talked to in the Republican aspect. Yes, there are some people who are going to say, you know, we can‘t afford it. We acquired to get out.

BRIAN KATULIS, Heart FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS: Well, we start up a hornet‘s nest. An enormous part of the issue was the Iraq warfare. I feel in Afghanistan, the preliminary response was warranted. However then we acquired caught and we diverted our attention to Iraq. This is what truly, if you return it what bin Laden wished in the nineties, this is exactly what he wished. He wanted us to drain our nationwide assets and reserves. And I feel this is what President Obama has received to face, is that we obtained to rebalance, you already know? We had a tenfold in our troop presence within the Center East, in part. And that is again, what al Qaeda wished. Iraq and Afghanistan. And we received to take care of our people here at home. MATTHEWS: Yes. When we start talking like that, we begin to speak like the Portuguese in Africa. We‘re just another colonial power coming dwelling as a result of we‘ve run out of cash. BOXER: -- Osama bin Laden and this is the commander-in-chief who's ending the Iraq struggle. It‘s—we‘ll have all our troops gone out of Iraq by the end of this year. So my coronary heart is with the president. I know that he‘s been, you already know, actually working this through. He has voices on one and another, I hope he‘s listened to all of the voices. However I think at the tip of the day, he mentioned the 30,000 would be short-term, and i took him at his phrase and that i hope that we‘ll see a faster calendar than what I think we‘re going to see. MATTHEWS: Senator Boxer, I imagine you turned an activist in politics, perhaps the best way numerous us did, due to the war in Vietnam. MATTHEWS: -- to have a Republican like Huntsman to the left of the president on this? Huntsman‘s saying that Afghanistan isn‘t actually isn‘t the front. It‘s coping with the economics of the world, preserving our competitive edge with China, et cetera. What does that make you are feeling like, to have a Republican president candidate to your—to use an previous phrase, to your left?

Now, in all fairness to him, he by no means actually ran against the Afghanistan struggle. However no person thought he would double down. MATTHEWS: After which we caught him. FINEMAN: Sure. And then we caught him. And what the White House officials are saying now's, Okay, we‘ve caught—we‘ve degraded—that‘s the phrase they all the time use. We‘ve degraded the al Qaeda capabilities in that nation. MATTHEWS: That‘s a struggle of attrition language. FINEMAN: So, but then it might comply with that we would get out. Not that we would take three years and nonetheless have sixty eight,000 troops there after next summer time. MATTHEWS: Let me supply my temporary now. I believe all three of us if we sat round and did it in our sleep would in all probability say, who‘s smarter, Obama or Biden? We‘d probably say Obama is near a genius. Biden is above common, sensible guy, but not up there on Obama‘s level. Why did the president hawk up? Why is he preserving basically more soldiers in there for the long haul? I wonder if Bush would have been staying this lengthy. KATULIS: I feel Bush would have stayed this long if he made the choice to return in there in the way that Obama did. And I think there‘s path dependency. KATULIS: A hundred thousand, yes. MATTHEWS: Properly, he‘s going the opposite way. KATULIS: And he‘s going—and the one reason I think he could be staying in there may be, across the border from Afghanistan is Pakistan. I believe the signaling when it comes to our troop presence is very important. MATTHEWS: Ok. This is very troubling. Thanks, Bob Baer. And thank you, Brian Katulis. Coming up—we are going hear from President Obama at the top of the hour, after all. We are waiting for that right now. Getting ready with preparations here. Once we return, let‘s get into the politics of getting out of Afghanistan—very troubling.

However you take a look at counterinsurgency, the primary measure, the number one metric, is you bought keep the populations in those nations protected. You have a look at Afghanistan final year, you've more Afghan civilians die since we‘ve been in the country for 10 years. And that is after we‘ve applied this counterinsurgency technique. MATTHEWS: Effectively, again, the query of causality. We didn‘t result in the Taliban current. They were there earlier than we obtained there. They‘ll be there when we‘re gone. KATULIS: No, but these Afghan civilian deaths, most of them are caused by the Taliban and guess what? In case you beloved this short article and also you desire to be given details concerning tìm việc làm generously go to our web-page. It‘s in large half response to the international troop presence. The Taliban don‘t want us there. And that‘s the big part of it. The one thing I'd disagree with Bob on, sure, I believe there‘s a politics of trying to remain in Afghan. There‘s one other political scenario that‘s growing, both from the Republicans and the Democrat, it‘s—why are we not only in struggle in Afghanistan, what are we doing in Libya and different places? MATTHEWS: I don‘t need to get into the others. I want to get into Afghanistan tonight because that‘s what the president is speaking.