Former John McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt pushed back against Chris Matthews on tonight's Hardball when the latter whipped out his tired Bush-caused-ISIS talking point.

On tonight's Tell Me Something I Don't Know"" segment wherein Hardball host Chris Matthews challenged his roundtable panelists to break some news, panelist Michelle Bernard succeeded when she informed the MSNBC anchor that Obama administration policy forbade visa-application screeners from looking at social media accounts for applicants like Tashfeen Malik, the female jihadi in the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

In an interview with GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum on the December 1 edition of Hardball, MSNBC's Chris Matthews insisted that mass shootings don't happen "all over Europe." When an incredulous Santorum reminded Matthews about the November 13 Paris terrorist attacks, Matthews shot back that the Paris perpetrators were terrorists and not "locals."

This week, journalists echo the Obama line on Syrian refugees, blasting Republicans for their "ugly" "fear talk," even as FNC anchor Shepard Smith scolds the "collective freak-out....We cannot resort to the tactics of the barbarians." Meanwhile, ABC's Jon Karl confronts GOP candidate Ted Cruz: "You don't think it's un-American to say, only Christians, no Muslims?" And Scott Pelley scolds new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for saying Obama is untrustworthy on immigration: "That's not wiping the slate clean. That's blowing chalk dust in the President's face."

Back in the mid-1980s, a hero of Chris Matthews's, Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy (D-Mass.), attempted to mock Ronald Reagan's anti-ballistic missile shield program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, by tagging it as a "Star Wars" program. But rather than catching on as a derisive term, most Americans thought it absolutely cool the idea that the U.S. could defense a way to blow up incoming nuclear missiles and thereby neutralize the Soviet nuclear threat.

Fast foward 32 years to tonight and it seems the MSNBC Hardball host thought that comparing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to Luke Skywalker was a great way to mock him for his soaring rhetoric on the House floor about defending the country from terrorism.