Free Republic

MSNBC's Chris Matthews made a bold prediction on Wednesday's Hardball. "The hard-right is going to take over the Republican Party in 2016 and the nomination is going to Rand Paul" (video follows with transcript and commentary):CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with this. I’ve been offering a prediction of late. Let me nail it down now. I believe the Republican Party is going to go hard-right in 2016. It’s going to run someone from the growing hard-right wing of the Party, something it hasn't done since 1980. And here's the thinking which works equally...

Money line: “This is what I do for a living.” Didn’t he predict a Bush/Clinton race in 2016 just nine months ago? If he believes what he says here about the parties swinging like “pendulums” from moderate nominees to ideologues and then back again, why would he have named Jeb as a strong contender last November? In fact, the roots of the counterargument are in Matthews’s own shpiel here: Most of the time, they head to the center. This is what Republicans did most successfully in 1952 – when, after twenty years of Roosevelt and Harry Truman – they wanted...