Free advice for Chris Matthews: Now that your wife Kathleen is running for Congress, you might want to avoid the nasty on-air name-calling of Republicans with whom you disagree.
On Monday's Hardball, previewing an interview with anti-war activist Fred Boenig who recently publicly rebuked Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Matthews slammed the freshman Republican by practically comparing him to Norman Bates, the titular character of the Hitchcock classic Psycho. Matthews repeated the slur during his chat with Boenig:
MSNBC
Hardball
June 8, 20157:12 p.m. Eastern
CHRIS MATTHEWS: [S]tanding up to the war hawks, we're going to meet a father tonight, right here, who lost his son in Afghanistan. He's now taking on Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, one of the Senate's biggest hawks, about the never-ending push for war in the Middle East. By the way I call Tom Cotton, Bates Motel, you figure it out.
[...]
7:32 p.m. Eastern
MATTHEWS: This guy, the Bates Motel, it's always like that. He always reminds me of Tony Perkins in Psycho. I mean, this guy is so hawkish, it's always, we've got to fight right now. We have to fight for the world because they're coming to get us.
This isn't the first time Matthews has used the term to describe Cotton. Here's a reference from the Thursday, May 7 edition of Hardball:
7:50 p.m. Eastern
MATTHEWS: The U.S. Senate today overwhelmingly passed the Iran nuclear agreement review act, which requires President Obama to submit any final nuclear deal with Iran to Congress before being able to waive or suspend congressional sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The vote was, catch this, 98-1. The only vote against the bill came from Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has been doing everything he can to scare off a deal with Iran. The bill now goes to the House, where Speaker John Boehner says it will pass. By the way, Tom Cotton should be called Bates Motel, he just scares people away.
Cotton joins the company of fellow Republicans Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Dick Cheney, whom he referred to as Mephistopheles, a theocrat, and the "creator" of ISIS, respectively.
