My people

Of course this is ultimately a silly exchange but I smiled a bit yesterday during this exchange on Hardball following the Tim Russert Memorial nonetheless,

MATTHEWS: We‘re back with our coverage for the memorial service for Tim Russert. We‘re joined right now by my pal, MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman of “Newsweek.”

Howard buddy, I‘m feeling warm. This is something else. You and I were talking the ethnic piece today. Tell me your reaction is to what you‘re seeing here.

HOWARD FINEMAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: As an insider, but outsider it struck me for a long time covering politics that politics in America is basically an Irish-Catholic enterprise. I can say that. Maybe you can.

I thought everything about Tim represented that; the speech, the gift for gab, the love of argument, the Jesuit thinking, the political organizing. Tim was the very embodiment of that in modern times.

MATTHEWS: The blarney.

FINEMAN: Well, the blarney and the focus. He took it from politics, which he mastered at a young age as they were talking about in here today. How he wired the CYO and went with Moynihan and Cuomo.

MATTHEWS: And how he got out of all those jams he was in.

FINEMAN: Get out of all the jams that he got into and out of. And then he moved out over to journalism, he took the Jesuit training and the love of politics that only Irish-Catholics fully understand for some reason.

And I‘ve spent my whole life as a reporter trying to figure out what it is, and it‘s a mix of the history of island and the love of speech and the Book of Kells and whatever it is, and the faith—

I'd like to think there's a little something to that theory.