MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews may have a show entitled Hardball and screech “let’s play hardball” at the top of each show, but it rarely squares with reality. Wednesday was no different as Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard appeared for a friendly chat bashing the Saudis but was not pressed on her coziness with the murderous Assad regime in Syria.

Syria came up twice, but both were off-hand comments by Matthews and Gabbard as just another country in the region where, in their minds, the U.S. should remove troops and not implement regime change. Of course, Gabbard would be against regime change, but that’s because it’d involve the removal of the man she’s expressed doubts on whether he gassed his own people.

Matthews first didn’t ask Gabbard so much a question as complain that the Trump administration’s response to Jamal Khashoggi’s murder was similar to the President’s answers about why he won’t release his tax returns: “It’s nonsense. It’s B.S. Nobody believes they’re doing anything, but just delay. Why are they doing this?”

This allowed Gabbard to unspool a long rant without pushback (click “expand”):

The biggest B.S. that I see in this whole thing is the statement that you hear from President Trump. You hear it from Mike Pompeo. You hear it from different people within this administration, that Saudi Arabia is a good ally, or is our best ally or our best friend within the region. The — the issue here with the murdering of this journalist in Turkey shines a light on the larger question that I think needs to be asked and answered here in Washington, which is, show the evidence of how Saudi Arabia is our ally, because I can tell you, there is a long list of reasons pointing to all of the reasons why they are not our allies, why they are acting directly in ways that are counterproductive to the interests of the American people and to our own national security interests.

Matthews replied by lamenting that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner has “a buddy in MBS, the killer over there” who’s “seduced” Kushner into “think[ing] he’s going to get an Israel — a pro-Israeli deal, not just a deal in the Middle East, but a deal that Netanyahu is going to like, the hard — the hardest of the Likudniks, that he’s going to like it.”

Gabbard offered more Saudi bashing and Matthews was more than pleased to oblige with the Hawaii congresswoman slamming the administration for “further ratcheting up tensions with other nuclear powers in the world, further beating those hawkish neocon war drums.”

Matthews gushed in reply that “you sound like me talking here” and “I like this” before shifting to how Trump, in his book, has failed on not only stopping “stupid wars,” but neglected our troops (which, as my colleague Nick Fondacaro has repeatedly chronicled, is nonsense).

Matthews then ended the six-minute-plus segment by pressing Gabbard on whether she’ll join the seemingly infinite field of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and specifically “what would stop you from running.”

As for Gabbard and Assad, the record speaks for itself. Even outlets like The Guardian and reporter Sabrina Siddiqui admitted in August that “[h]er highly controversial visit last year to Syria, where she met with Assad, also raised eyebrows both nationally and at home.”

When the Assad regime carried out a chemical weapons attack on innocent people in April 2017, Gabbard stood by Assad by saying she was “skeptical” he’d do such a thing and based U.S. intelligence: “Why should we just blindly follow this escalation of a counterproductive regime-change war?”

It was perhaps Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin who put it best in January 2017 with this piece “How Tulsi Gabbard became Assad’s mouthpiece in Washington.”

Scratch that. Washington Examiner columnist and McLaughlin Group host Tom Rogan wrote a November 22 piece on Gabbard’s comments against the Saudi regime in light of Khashoggi that was even better. Here’s an excerpt (click “expand”):

The reality of what Gabbard has done with Assad, whom she has visited and defended in public, isn't just hypocritical, it's morally foul. That makes Gabbard far different from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for example, who also ardently opposes any kind of effort to confront Assad's regime. Because Paul hasn't rendered himself a political servant for Assad, he's simply opposed U.S. policy toward Syria. Gabbard, however, has basically spent the past few years morphing into an active member of the Syrian Baath party's tolerated side party. In their not-so-fine company she has attended "fact-finding" trips to Syria. This has included happy meetings with Bashar Assad, who has gassed, starved, barrel bombed, tortured, and hanged at least 200,000 of his own people. Gabbard has every right to be an idiot. But by lending her congressional credibility to Assad, the congresswoman nuked American morality in order to get a few photos with a tyrant.

Mic drop!

To see the relevant transcript from MSNBC’s Hardball on December 12, click “expand.”