The senseless blubbering, the misplaced anger, the confusion, the over- and under-reliance on polling data, the twin evils of tiptoeing around racial topics and treating them with no care or nuance or sense of history, all of the things present in this clip between Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews represent everything that’s been horribly wrong about the cable news coverage of Hillary Clinton v. Barack Obama. The irony is clear — two well-off, educated, elite, white men, from their vantage points in air-conditioned, big-city studios, are arguing passionately about the motivations of poor, uneducated whites in West Virginia and blacks in Philadelphia.

Watch as Chris Matthews chuckles at the sheer ridiculousness of Pat Buchanan’s thinly-veiled bigotry while not recognizing the silliness of his own “can’t we all just get along?” speech. But as long as we’re asking questions, can’t we all just hire some more competent pundits? Without getting into the flimsiness of Buchanan’s unoriginal “Why is it an issue when all whites vote for Clinton and it’s not an issue when all blacks vote for Obama?” argument, it’s painfully clear that the once-thriving cable news formula that worked so well for so many years has been thrown for a loop with this election. These men are woefully under-equipped to handle the journalistic challenges that Obama and Clinton’s candidacies present. The worst part is that they don’t even know it. Or maybe they’re just too arrogant to care.