Chris Matthews on Hardball last night, at 13:00 or so

One other applaud for your dad [Ronald Reagan]. I will say this, he would not have taken us into that idiotic war in Iraq. No way in the world would the neocons have pushed him into that war like they did with that guy W who had nothing in his head to fight back with.

This is an important moment from the streetsmart sage. Even though the Israel lobby has paid for Matthews to go to Israel, and MSNBC refuses to come clean on the junkets, he knows why we went to war in Iraq, because of a feverish ideology that captured a stupid president. Joe Klein explained this long ago, as did Walt and Mearsheimer. Don’t confuse the issue with talk about oil (the Russians and the Chinese have the big concessions now), or American imperialism (Iraq is now against the U.S. on Iran) or Cheney or Bush being deciders. The neocons had a powerful theory, and powerful positions. They were the best and the brightest all over again; and many of them were ultra-Zionists.