Somebody get the cane — there, at his straining white neck supporting that big moon-swooning-over-himself head — and get Chris Matthews off the stage.

He is already running for US Senate, using his nightly two-hours of Hardball — not to mention his half-hour Sunday “round table” on NBC — as vehicles for what ought to be the biggest campaign train wreck in the history of Pennsylvania. Sure he’s coy — he’s not officially raising money or announcing formally that he’s exploring a run against 78-year-old Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (at that point, one would hope Matthews and his Human Ego Project would be off-mic for good, per some federal campaign finance law and on pure principle. Some journalists do have some of those left, and those that do should be completely outraged at the way he continues to operate). But the word is out, and contrary to conventional wisdom, all viewers ain’t stupid. Matthews doesn’t want to wreck a good thing, at least for now. He gets free air time to kiss up to political patrons like PA Gov. Ed Rendell and popular Philly radio jocks like Michael Smerconish, while his corporate masters at General Electric can at least hope for MSNBC’s ratings to pull out of the can.

That’s right — MSNBC is still the lowest rated out of the “big three” cable news networks, which still have a very small piece of the overall TV market, so this Matthews flap shouldn’t matter at all in the broader scheme of things. And Matthews is really only a “journalist” by courtesy — being that he and the network have baked up this fantasy that a former political operative and speechwriter who now barks inane questions at bemused guests (many who are as cloyingly desperate as he for the Washington on-air fix) while getting off on his own perceived intellectual vigor, is actually a working journalist.

But I just hate it when the corporate media behemoths get to have it both ways — NBC clinging to its misty water-colored news creds by lionizing its beefier personalities like the late Tim Russert, and wheeling out warmed-over bloviators like Tom Brokaw, and then indulging a guy who is very obviously abusing the privilege, not to mention shamelessly hawking cheesy airport books, sucking up to corrupt Wall Street profiteers and playing off NBC programming like god-awful Saturday Night Live clips as though they delivered breaking news tantamount to earthquakes and war.

Tonight, Matthews broke all records for greasiness when he tried to outdo Sarah Palin, railing against all those — in his sentiments — angry, shiftless Iraqis mobilized around the journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush yesterday. (Americans think it’s funny, he said, that these Iraqi men seem to have so much time on their hands to protest, ha, ha. Please, Matthews, don’t speak for me). How dare this man throw shoes, he said, or protesters burn the stars and stripes when the U.S sacrificed 4,000 men and women so people like that journalist could have the freedom to attend a perfectly reasonable, finely orchestrated event in which the President of the United States could whitewash the bloody scar that is his Iraq outside?

Matthews’ guests tonight, who included Rajiv Chandrasekaren, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, (who knows a thing or two about court jesters and sycophants) seemed mildly flummoxed — wasn’t this the same guy who had them on a while back to rail against neocons and Dick Cheney and misguided preemptive war? Nevermind, Matthews has rural constituents he has to patronize now — you know, those voters “who cling to their guns and their religion” and who couldn’t possibly know anything about why some poor Iraqi who had been kidnapped by his own people and detained by U.S forces and lives in a country with 30 percent unemployment might want to insult George W. Bush.

Just turn it off, you might say. Fair enough. Leave it to karma — you bet. But all this week we have had to stomach a parade of Bush Administration officials trying to sell this dung that the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, there are stories like these (the irony in the MSNBC-WaPo co-branding not lost here) that cling like storm detritus and break your heart, and we find out only today that the American taxpayer has poured billions of dollars into a feel-good reconstruction plan that never happened. Chris Matthews, who could never muster enough of his self-proclaimed skills at “hardball” to talk about the hired “message force multiplers” who sold this war on the Pentagon’s behalf (mostly because it’s hard to do that and be supplicant at the same time) is now doing the same thing, covertly trying to sell himself to the people of Pennsylvania. If that’s not grounds for a kick in the can, or even a small cry of protest from the Rapidly Shrinking Base of Principled Persons Who Still Watch TV News, I don’t know what does.