The DC Trawler’s Jim Treacher brings us classic audio from Hardball host Chris Matthews, who, this morning, in an interview with Mary Katharine Ham on WMAL in D.C., tried to say he never fretted in 2009 that Tea Partiers might become violent. When MKH calls him out for a specific quote, he admits lamely, “Well, obviously, I meant it at the time.”

The entire clip covers quite a bit of ground — Matthews shills for his new book “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” and talks Florida, too — but the juicy bit comes at about 6:09, when MKH begins to grill him about his Tea Party/Occupy double standard.

In the same interview this morning, for example, Matthews actually tried to make the case that he attempts to examine American politics objectively. NewsBusters’ Ken Shepherd provides a short list of Matthews’ more biased moments:

Ah yes, the ever-objective Chris Matthews, who has, on national TV:

• Said shortly after Obama’s election that it was his “job” to ensure President Obama has a “successful presidency”
• Fantasized about Dick Cheney waterboarding Karl Rove
• Grossly misrepresented and never issued an outright correction about, the size of the federal government under Obama
• Insisted he’d vote for Jon Huntsman were he a New Hampshire primary voter
• Insisted Rick Santorum favors constructing a “theocracy” that would “trump” the Constitution
• Conspiratorially posited that John Edwards’s criminal indictment was right-wing “revenge”
• Bashed the Republican Party at-large as “anti-science” and “troglodyte”
• Fantasized about Rush Limbaugh meeting a Bond villain-like demise

It never gets old — amassing the evidence of an utter lack of self-awareness.