About 15 minutes into Tuesday's "Hardball," Matthews posed the following question to Hughes:
"Let me ask you about, you know, there's a definition of a gentleman, I'm sure you heard it. It's not hurt someone's feelings or insult someone unintentionally, and if you want to call somebody out for a fight, fine. But if you don't want to hurt their feelings, don't do it by accident. You know, when I was working in the White House for President Carter as a speech writer, I was shocked to realize that the people in Iran hated the shah, that they, not just the Islamists and the right wing and the fundamentalists, but everybody wanted him out of there, including the middle-class business people wanted him out. And we, unfortunately, were wining and dining with him right to the end, and you saw what happened. We were hated and they took our hostages and humiliated us for a year. And then, of course, bin Laden, rightfully or wrongly, called out, called us for insulting his country by keeping 10,000 troops there for 10 years under the Bush, under the Clinton administration, coming into your administration, the President's. Are we sometimes to blame for the hell that we’ve raised? That's all I'm asking. Is it always the other guys' fault, or do we do things that send signals that we are the enemy of those people?"
