Even Fox News was more subdued than that. But that’s Matthews’ pundit style perfectly realized. He believes in the Great Man theory of everything and sees every event through the prism of the president’s relative manliness. The president failed to satisfy him again on September 10th when he announced his plan for ISIS in Iraq and Syria:

I heard all the necessary conditions but not the sufficient conditions for defeating ISIS. And I didn’t hear in there how we’re going to encourage the Arab countries, the Islamic world to go after ISIS. I didn’t hear that. I heard air strikes by the United States. I heard military training and support for the Free Syrian Army. I heard vague reference to someone over there flying with us over Syria right now without saying what country that was, what ally that was. Nothing really about the building of a posse. And everyone from David Ignatius and others who really know this region are saying the only way you defeat a cancer like this, like ISIS, is within the Islamic world itself. They must find themselves the strength and the determination to go in and erase this blot on their culture. And I didn’t hear in this speech how we’re going to do that or if we can even imagine being the leaders of such an effort. Again, I’ll say these are necessary steps. They didn’t sound sufficient.

Ok, so he thought the president should be putting together a posse to defeat cancer and he failed to say he was doing that. Of course, he actually did put together a regional coalition but that doesn’t appear to have appeased Matthews who is now terribly worried that the President isn’t choosing the right people to advise him. Yesterday he spelled it out in the terms that make the most sense to him. After rending his garments over Ebola and suggesting that America start quizzing all travelers in the Israeli style just to make them sweat, he wondered if President Obama was up to the job:

Let’s get tough here. Is this the problem of a second term that presidents get lazy, intellectually lazy and cut off from the country, and they start picking deputies for jobs instead of looking for the best people? The lazy thing to do is, somebody leaves, you promote their deputy. This is, I think, a big part of the endemic problem of second terms. They don`t get out and mix with people, find new people, new hot shots to fill these jobs. They just keep promoting the person whose sort of turn it is, and they`re not as good as the person they picked the first time…

Realizing that he had evoked a racist stereotype, he corrected himself. And then went right ahead with a patented Matthews sexist comment:

I want to straighten out something I said to Roger before you get me accusing him, accusing this president of being physically lazy. I think there`s a social kind of laziness, the refusal to reach out and meet a lot of new people and check a lot of possibilities. Don`t just go with the next person in line. And I really think this second term cabinet is not up to the first term cabinet because they never are.

And you know that, Roger. They just never are. Kennedy went out and met people like McNamara and Rusk and people went looking for them, and he put them in the best slots he could. He talked them into it. He recruited people he didn`t even know, he recruited them. Presidents should go out and look for people. They should be practicing affirmative action all the time in leading, or else they get atrophied into that little world of people around him like Valerie and Mrs. Obama and people — you`re just listening to the same voices all the time. You`ve got to be Protean in the White House. And I know it`s a rigorous demand, but it`s a real one, or else you`re going to get smaller as your presidency goes on, and therefore more vulnerable to surprises.

Real men don’t listen to the “little world” of “Valerie” and “Mrs Obama,” especially when terrorists and deadly diseases are involved. (Maybe they could be consulted on the birth control mandate or something like that.) That’s obtuse enough. But nothing can equal the sheer daftness of Chris Matthews evoking the architects of the Vietnam war as great examples of presidential cabinet choices. Perhaps if President Obama is lucky, he too will find someone as good as the men who mired this nation into the worst foreign military quagmire it’s ever known.

But he also might want to get fitted for a flight suit, just in case.