Matthews and Russert

Chris Matthews seems in a clumsy way to indict Tim Russert for helping to sell the Iraq war:

It's a fair criticism, albeit delivered in Matthews' inimitable man-crush style. What he's saying seems to be that Russert, as Everyman, was as susceptible to administration lies as the rest of us average guys.

That's all well and good, but Russert wasn't paid to be an average guy, was he. He was paid, I hope, to look even harder when his "average patriot" button was pushed. He did just the opposite.

(It has been noticed that the transcript of this comment has "disappeared" from Matthews' site. Unfortunately the YouTube version has not.)