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ABC's Jonathan Karl and his part in helping to feed the scandal-mongering over Benghazi wasn't the only recent Republican drummed up outrage Stephen Colbert decided to take on during this Monday's show. After his "Mazda-Scandal Booth" on Benghazi, Colbert took his next turn in the booth on the IRS, grasping "wildly at any accusation that floats past."

And as Arturo Garcia from Raw Story reported, here's what he found: Colbert concludes tea partiers are ‘a bunch of pussies’ after consulting his lawyer:

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Unlike his cohort Jon Stewart, who hasn't bothered to mention Jonathan Karl's Benghazi email scandal all week, Stephen Colbert had no problem taking the ABC reporter to the woodshed and giving him the treatment he deserved after his non-apology over the weekend.

Bruinkid over at KOS actually took the time to transcribe the whole show which I'll share part of here: Stephen Colbert lays waste to ABC's Jonathan Karl for his Benghazi lies:

And tonight's scandal is... Benghazi!!

Yes, Benghazi. Following the tragic attacks of eight months ago, Benghazi, and the rumored cover-up, has become problem #1 for the Obama administration. [...]

Yes, Benghazi is the biggest scandal since sliced bread was caught funneling money to Nicaraguan death squads. And folks, if Republicans are angry now, imagine how they'll feel when they learn where Benghazi is. [...]

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As we already discussed here, Donald Rumsfeld found himself getting a nice softball interview from NBC's David Gregory this weekend on Meet the Press, but not all of his book tour has gone quite as smoothly as the big wet kiss he got from Gregory this Sunday.

Majority FM's Sam Seder walked his listeners though some of the highlights of Rumsfeld's contentious interview with American Public Media's Kai Ryssdal, who, as the KOS diary I linked in the prior post on the subject noted, asked "Rumsfeld some of the questions we've all wanted to ask."

As Seder noted, Rumsfeld might be looking to find himself a new publicist after that one, since he certainly didn't expect anyone to actually hold him accountable for his actions during the Bush administration and our invasion of Iraq. Seder says he hopes that it's not the last time he's subjected to an interview like this one because the government sure isn't going to hold him accountable, but I wouldn't hold my breath on whether he'll let it happen ever again.

Sadly, we're not going to see the corporate media hold him accountable either. We're going to see more interviews like the shameful one we got from David Gregory or we won't see him on the air at all.

One final note on the video above: Seder incorrectly identified Kai Ryssdal as working for NPR. He works for APM.

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I'm not sure what happened, but it appears Candy Crowley has either gotten tired of being beaten up on by right-wingers for being unfair to poor old Mittens during the presidential debates, or she's developed a really bad case of amnesia since she first stunned Romney by fact checking him when he claimed that President Obama did not call the attack in Libya an act of terror.

Whatever the reason, she did a complete 180 and began the right's game of parsing the President's words when interviewing White House advisor Dan Pfeiffer this Sunday: CNN's Crowley Adopts False Right-Wing Claim That Obama Didn't Call Benghazi A Terrorist Attack.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Deputy White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that Republicans owed Susan Rice an apology after they misled the country about the Benghazi emails -- a story that was hyped by his network's correspondent Jonathan Karl. After Stephanopoulos feigned ignorance on the matter, Pfeiffer should have told him ABC owes her an apology as well.

Karl gave a sorry excuse for apology this weekend, saying that he regrets that "the email was quoted incorrectly." More like he regrets getting caught. So to sum things up after reading his statement and listening to this interview -- not only is ABC refusing to come clean about the names of the Republicans who lied to them and conned them into hyping and giving new life to this so-called scandal that was being ignored by most of the networks other than Fox until Karl and ABC decided to lend it some credibility -- Stephanopoulos decides to sit there and pretend he doesn't have any idea why someone might want Republicans to apologize to Susan Rice after what they did to her.

Instead he decided to ask Pfeiffer about the emails without a word on Karl's "apology" or any acknowledgement of his network helping to spread lies for Republicans by hyping doctored versions of them. Stephanopoulos should have been opening This Week with a statement from the network on their shoddy "journalism" and with Karl's statement instead of trying to pretend it didn't happen.

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Sen. Rand Paul continued with his charges from earlier this week that former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton had "her fingerprints all over these talking points" on the Benghazi attack and claims that she never "really accepted culpability" because she failed to resign shortly after the tragedy. When CNN's Candy Crowley asked Paul if he was worried about appearing to politicize the controversy by making his remarks in Iowa and other presidential battleground states, Paul dismissed the notion that his remarks were based on politics.

It's laughable that anyone expects us to believe that Republicans care one iota about this trumped up Benghazi story for any other reason than to muddy up Hillary Clinton, because they all assume she's going to be the front-runner for the next presidential election.

And I'd say it's safe to assume Rand Paul is going to take up his father's mantle and make a career out of perpetually running for president as a fundraising scheme. It worked out pretty well for his dad and the press is already propping him up because of it -- with this being the latest example -- so why not?

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So just how overblown does your scandal mongering and false equivalencies have to get before they're even too much for NBC's David Gregory to stomach without some push back? Peggy Noonan found out this Sunday on Meet the Press, after writing an op-ed this week which called these trumped up "scandals" the media has been fixating on "the worst Washington scandal since Watergate."

As Gregory pointed out to Noonan, the administration she worked for well after the Watergate scandal had that pesky little problem called Iran-Contra that she somehow forgot to mention in her article. Of course, reminding her about St. Ronnie's problems didn't seem to faze her one bit:

GREGORY: Peggy Noonan, you wrote something this week that really struck me in your column on Friday. And I want to put it up on the screen and ask you about it. “We are in the midst,” you write, “Of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. [The IRS and AP scandals] have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.”

I have to say, Peggy, what you don’t talk about here is an administration for a man that you worked for who led the Iran-Catra-- Contra scandal where they ran a secret war and lied to Congress and all the rest. Over-- overstatement here?

PEGGY NOONAN: I don’t think so. I think this is-- what is going on now is all three of these scandals makes a cluster that implies some very bad things about the forthcomingness of the administration and about its ability to at certain dramatic points do the right thing. And I got to tell you, the-- you-- everyone can argue about which of these things is most upsetting, but this IRS thing is something I’ve never seen in my lifetime. It is the revenue gathering arm of the U.S. government…

GREGORY: Peggy-- Peggy, wait a second.

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Yes, who better to ask about "government accountability" than war criminal Donald Rumsfeld? It seems the producers of Meet the Press and host David Gregory are doing their best to become a parody of Fox "News" - because that's certainly what they gave us this Sunday by allowing Rumsfeld on there for this softball interview.

We didn't get any questions about the invasion of Iraq, or torture, or whether Rumsfeld has any remorse about his actions during the Bush administration, but we were treated to him being asked about sexual assaults in the military, the IRS, Benghazi and of course he got plenty of time to hawk his new book.

Note to David Gregory: Here's how an interview with Donald Rumsfeld should be conducted if you want to call yourself a "journalist." -- Kai Ryssdal asks Rumsfeld some of the questions we've all wanted to ask.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript if you don't have the stomach for watching the clip.

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While others in the media are finally acknowledging that the Benghazi "scandal" which Fox has been pushing for months on end is nothing but a witch hunt and that ABC's big "scoop" on White House emails just left egg on their face and was nothing but lies being fed to them by Republicans, what are they doing over at Fox?

You guessed it... still scandal-mongering over Benghazi. And of course there was no acknowledgement by anyone on the panel of Fox News Watch this Saturday that the Republicans were caught feeding lies to ABC News. In Fox-land, the talking points by Susan Rice are still supposedly a scandal. They're carping that the White House doesn't treat the press nicely enough to suit them and that they don't know how to handle their messaging properly -- because we all know if they were better at messaging and nicer to the press, Fox would then give them a fair shake, right? They haven't managed to make this fake scandal of theirs stick, but they're still grasping at straws to be outraged about.

I thought that maybe they would just move on, since they've got themselves a couple of new drummed up "scandals" to chase after as well, but apparently they're not ready to let this witch hunt go any time soon.

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Here we go again with more fearmongering from Fox and crazy-eyes, lying wingnut Rep. Michele Bachmann. The scandal-mongering continues with more attacks on the IRS. Now, not only is the department evil incarnate for going after those poor, poor tea partiers who are upset about delays in getting their tax exempt status -- that none of them deserved in the first place -- now the IRS is literally going to kill people as the "enforcer of Obamacare."

The death panels are back again and Bachmann has suddenly developed a concern about what Americans with pre-existing conditions are going to do to get insurance coverage. It's funny that they only care about that issue now that it involves repealing President Obama's health care law. I would love for someone to explain to me just what the Republicans and the likes of Bachmann have ever done or plan to do to help those who have been denied health insurance. Repealing the health care law with nothing to replace it will only make the matter worse, not better. That doesn't seem to matter much in wingnut world though.

It obviously didn't matter to Bachmann, who bragged to Cashin' In guest host Eric Bolling that they again wasted the taxpayers' time and money with yet another repeal vote this week, and who has convinced herself that after the mid-term elections, President Obama is going to be forced into having to sign a repeal of the law himself after the Senate follows the House's lead and passes it, I guess after half of the country dies from the IRS denying them health care... or something in the fantasy that is going on in Bachmann's mind.

Oh... and expect more hearings. I'm sure America can hardly wait for the clown show we already saw in Issa's committee last week to continue for months or years on end.

As Media Matters recently reported, this is typical of what the viewers over at Fox have been being treated to for some time now: Grasping For New Scandals, Fox Fearmongers That Obamacare Will Allow IRS To Deny Medical Treatment.

Go read the whole post for some debunking of Bachmann and Bolling's fearmongering here.