Shut up. Just shut up.

The cable personality who has that "fingernails on a blackboard" effect on me is Chris Matthews, the onetime aide to Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill who emcees the show Hardball.  

To say that Matthews talks too much is like saying Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh are fat.  Some things are just so obvious they don't need to be enunciated.

Matthews like to position himself as a "political expert" who knows more about politics than any of the guests who appear on his 60-minute show.  I'll get to the issue of his "expertise" in a moment.  What really sets Matthews apart from the other cable personalities is that he never shuts up talking.  Not for a milli-second do his lips stop moving for the entire run of the show.  He has the worst case of logorrhea I've ever seen on a television host.

Hardball is supposedly a show where Matthews interviews elected officials and political consultants on the big news developments of the day.  The only problem is, a Chris Matthews interview consists of Matthews asking a question and then immediately following the question with a long, rambling, high-decibel answer - while the guest sits there slack-jawed, unable to get a word in edgewise.

If Matthews had ever gone to journalism school, he would have flunked every course on broadcast interviews because the man is absolutely incapable of shutting up and letting someone else - anyone else - say anything.

I suppose one could make the argument that Matthews has such deep and abiding insights into politics that his every word is important and it really doesn't matter that nobody else gets to talk.  But that argument falls apart with a simple re-reading of some past Matthews utterances.

Here's what the blonde-haired genius said on May 1, 2003, after George W. Bush gave his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech on the deck of an aircraft carrier:

"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits. We don't want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president."

That same night, Matthews insightfully added:  "The president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics."

I'll let those comments sink in.  Then I'll raise this question about Matthews:  why is someone who has made remarks like those even allowed to call himself a "political expert" on cable TV?

Matthews has been talking way too much for a long time.  Won't somebody put an end to this torture?  MSNBC needs to appoint an executive producer who sole job is go to Matthews' dressing room every day before he goes on the air and slap Matthews across the face while simultaneously telling him to STFU.   I'd nominate that producer for a Peabody Award right now.

After MSNBC fixes its Matthews problem (I know it's never going to happen, but indulge me) they need to do something about another worthless bag of protoplasm that fills a chair for three hours every morning:  former Florida congressman Joe Scarborough.

Joey Scar doesn't talk quite as much as Chris Matthews - although he's close - but he proves himself to be equally ill-informed whenever he starts his blow-hard pontificating.  He's also an on-the-air bully who's in bad need of being taken down a notch or two.

National security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski did just that last December when he showed up for a guest stint on "Morning Joe" and got dragged into a conversation in which Scarborough kept hectoring him and insisting that the Bush administration was blameless in the current mess in the Middle East.

Zbiggie looked at Joe with the withering scorn that ninth-grade teachers reserve for classroom loudmouths and said icily:  "You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

Co-host Mika Brzezinski was in the unfortunate position of sitting next to Scarborough while her dad ripped a new one in the pompous windbag.  The expression on her face was priceless:  she looked just like the Northside matron who's discovered there's a big brown turd floating in the punch bowl at her daughter's wedding reception.  

For the sake of all of us, shut them up.  Please.