Wait, how does being against socialized medicine — and socialism in general — make someone a National Socialist in the eyes of NBC-Comcast spokesman Chris Matthews?

While appearing on Wednesday’s edition of Morning Joe, Hardball host Chris Matthews compared Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to Hitler, telling fellow MSNBC demagogue Joe Scarborough the German dictator “even liked Jimmy Stewart” in the movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Mediaite reported. This was after Matthews said Tuesday that Cruz is “a problem for our Republic.” “He is a problem for our Republic,” Matthews declared, claiming that despite being a United States Senator, Cruz is not a legislator, nor is he allegedly a member of any political party. “He has contempt for the American political system. He is not a member of any political party that I can tell,” he said. “His behavior has been totally and utterly destructive.”

So you’re saying that eventually, he could fundamentally transform the United States of America. Why, it’s enough to get a tingle up your leg at the thought.

Or at least at the thought of watching continued spittle-flecked demagoguery from the MSM; particularly given that Cruz isn’t the first GOP senator with Tea Support that Matthews has Godwinized. Recall this moment in late October of 2010, when underwater poll results for Democrat candidates mixed with perennially poor ratings numbers for MSNBC were causing tempers to flare (even more so than usual at America’s scowlingist network), after a leftwing protestor lunged at Rand Paul’s car at a campaign stop:

As Geoffrey Dickens of Newsbusters writes, not surprisingly, MSNBC has red-lined the Godwin Meter since the story first broke: Chris Matthews, on Wednesday’s Hardball, not so cryptically compared the actions of Republican volunteers to that of Nazi-style tactics from the 1930s as he claimed the restraining of a MoveOn.org activist by a Rand Paul supporter reminded him of what “we saw from hoodlums in the thirties in another country I will not mention” and added: “I mean it isn’t far from what we saw in the thirties, where all of a sudden, political parties started showing up in uniform.” Matthews who was joined by Salon’s Joan Walsh and the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, even went on to claim physical attacks against political opponents was something that existed exclusively on one ideological side as he asserted that it was “right wing by its very nature.” Shhh, nobody tell MSNBC about this far-right tea-bagging neocon, who told a shocked college audience during the politically charged year of 1968 at Kansas State U. (and what is the matter with them, anyhow?): ‘If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.’ ” … Incidentally, Matthews’ freakout today was a follow-up to his remarks yesterday, when he blurted…

But then, doesn’t everything remind Chris of the 1930s in another country?

Related: From Ace, “Media Which Wetted Its Panties Over Wendy Davis Has Not a Good Thing to Say About Ted Cruz.”

Unexpectedly!

Update: “Video: McCain delivers the Democratic response to Cruz.” Equally “unexpectedly,” alas.

When will McCain do an Arlen Specter or Jim Jeffords and make it official? (Possible answer: Sometime after November of 2014 if the GOP achieves parity in the Senate?)