Everything you need to know about the descent of the conservative movement into a hypocritical caricature is illustrated by two of its proudest constituencies: Republican deficit hawks and so-called "born again virgins." Having already violated the moral strictures they claim to hold dearest, each now asks the American people to join them in pretending their sin never happened. But unlike a generation of Republican leaders who built a mountain of national debt for the United States, the secondary virgins only screwed themselves.

The Republicans' shameless cynicism was perfectly captured by Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2002 proclaimed, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Not, that is, if a Republican is in the White House. But when Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office and the $1.2 trillion deficit George W. Bush left for him there, the GOP quickly changed its tune. While the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under President Bush, House Minority Leader John Boehner in February decried the $787 billion emergency economic recovery spending as "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." By June, Boehner warned of the "crushing debt Washington Democrats are running up." And Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), Obama's aborted choice for Commerce Secretary, slapped the President last month, "we're basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country." And, Gregg added:

"You can't keep throwing debt on top of debt."

Of course, throwing debt on top of debt is precisely what Gregg and his GOP allies have done for over a generation.

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(November 12, 1979 - Getting a bit testy all around)

As the hostage drama continued to unfold (still at over 60 sitting in the Embassy in Tehran), Jimmy Carter started imposing sanctions on the Iranians, to not much success.

Jimmy Carter: “I am ordering that we discontinue purchasing of any oil from Iran for delivery to this country."

Making matters worse, demonstrations were popping up at college campuses all over, especially in Los Angeles, where Iranian students demonstrated in support of the hostage takers and the anti-Iranian crowd started making their presence felt.

All in all, it was clearly not going to be solved any time soon, and situations only made a bad situation worse.

And there was that added bonus of Ronald Reagan declaring his candidacy for President - to be official the next day.

Interesting coincidence, that.

Here is an excerpt of the day, as heard over KNX in Los Angeles

There are, perhaps, only a few jobs for which you truly cannot prepare, but just leap in and do.

One of those jobs has to be President of the United States. No matter how much you think you've learned--be it in the Senate like Barack Obama, or as the governor of a state, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, or even as Vice President, like George HW Bush and Lyndon Johnson--the American presidency is a whole other animal. Often insulated and isolated from those who put you in office, the American president must juggle political, economic, foreign, security and partisan interests to lead the Executive Branch--and the free world--to the best of their abilities.

Obviously, some presidencies are more successful than others.

As journalists assigned to cover the White House, Craig Crawford of CQ Politics and Helen Thomas of the Hearst News Syndicate, together share decades of observing from the White House Press Room. They have watched and noted each success and each blunder. Helen Thomas has covered more presidents than any other present journalist, starting with JFK in 1960, but her career really began in 1945 during Roosevelt's administration. Craig Crawford, who actually interned as a college student in Jimmy Carter's press office, began covering presidential campaigns in 1988 with Ronald Reagan. So there's no shortage of presidential triumphs and stumbles between them, and it is that experience they have collated to create Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do, where they share the attributes of successful presidencies by looking at the choices made by predecessors: from Clinton's prickly and sometimes overly hostile handling of the press to JFK's deft deflectons with humor, from Johnson's brave stance on civil rights, knowing the political costs to him and his party to Reagan's Cold War fight, which alienated him with his conservative base when he began negotiating nuclear disarmament with Gorbachev.

Every presidency is marked with mistakes as the president navigates this unbelievably difficult and occasionally thankless job, but Helen and Craig have listed some basic principles which, if followed, should make any future president successful, such as finding trustworthy advisers, remembering they are not above the law, be honest, have the courage to do the hard thing and keep a clear vision.

I'm happy to have Craig Crawford here with us today to discuss his book, Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do. Please join us to chat on what makes for a successful American presidency.

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When news came that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I looked at my husband and said, "just watch, the wingnuts will lose it over this." And sure enough, I was right. But what threw me for a loop was how nakedly partisan CBS's Chip Reid was in attacking Obama for having the audacity to win the Nobel Prize, something even the great St. Ronnie didn't do:

REID: I mean, most Democrats have praised it, and most Republicans have said, you have got to be kidding me -- Ronald Reagan didn't get one, but Barack Obama, nominated 12 days after he was sworn in, gets a Nobel Peace Prize. And the fear among some, even some Democrats, is that this is going to widen the partisan divide and make things even more difficult to accomplish on every front.

Really? Even more difficult than reflexively fighting *every* *single* Obama agenda item now? How is that possible?

It's touching, isn't it, to hear Chip Reid's concern that this will widen the partisan divide? After all, past winners have included Al Gore and Jimmy Carter...obviously the Nobel committee loves them some Democrats.

But here's the thing that all these insulated Beltway Villagers continually forget: Outside of DC, life is more than Republican vs. Democrat, something that Gibbs gently tries to suggest to Reid:

GIBBS: I'll leave the pundicizing to the pundits. The notion that somehow this is going to more greatly divide America, you know, I think it should be mandatory that pundits spend a certain amount of their days each year outside of the friendly confines of the viewership of the Washington, D.C., media market.

Of course, that goes right over Reid's head. For Reid, this is all about dismissing the Nobel committee -- in Norway, mind you, and not subject to the mind-numbing partisan reduction that Reid seems to breathe as oxygen -- as some liberal organization. He just can't get his head wrapped around the fact the Ronald Reagan -- the man who ended the Cold War! -- was never awarded the Peace Prize. As my friend, Steve Benen says:

A few thoughts here. First, when White House correspondents from major news outlets start sounding like members of Grover Norquist's "We Love Reagan" fan club, it's not a positive development.

Second, the notion that Reagan "helped bring the Cold War to an end" is, at best, a dubious proposition.

Actually, I think Chip Reid is unintentionally letting us into his psyche more than he realizes. He's continually been a go-to guy for Republican talking points for years. He routinely criticizes Democrats for things he lets pass by Republicans and uncritically passes on Republican attacks without context or fact-checking. And here again, he mouths the GOP mentality.

But think about it: if the Nobel Peace Prize only supports liberal causes, isn't Chip Reid admitting that peace is liberal? Then we need never look to conservatives again, because they will never bring peace. Right, Chip?

Transcript below the fold

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(G-7 London Summit - even the protests were anemic)

With the G-20 Summit fading from view, I ran across a roundtable discussion of the recently ended G-7 Summit from June 10, 1984. Very tame by comparison to recent Economic Summit meetings, certainly the last two.

But back in 1984 it was all about the Cold War, with sprinklings of the state of the world economy kept off to the side.

Reagan was facing an election year and polishing up the Shining City was at the forefront.

During this Face The Nation program, Leslie Stahl asks several European correspondents their take on the meeting just ended.

Peter Jenkins (Political Editor – The Guardian): “There’s a suspicion now isn’t there, that what we’re seeing now is a President running for re-election and when he’s re-elected he may revert to the true Ronald Reagan. Now I don’t happen to think that will be the case, because I think that he will get sort of locked in to the new policy lines that he’s developing. But I think quite a few European people will reserve judgment until they see what Ronald Reagan looks like on his second Inauguration day."

And of course the interview with Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt wasn't going to veer off course, despite hints from Stahl that all was not harmonious among the G-7.

Showing cracks in the facade just wasn't going to happen.

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Rachel Maddow and Sen. Bernie Sanders discuss the GOP's hypocrisy when now claiming to be the great champions of Medicare after years of railing against it.

MADDOW: Belated salvo in the scare the bejesus out of elderly voters so they‘ll put you back in power regardless of whether you‘re telling the truth war is an editorial in the conservative newspaper, “The Washington Times,” and it screams “Death Panels by Proxy”—ostensibly argues that the so-called Baucus bill on health reform encourages doctors to withhold health care from Medicare patients. Health care reform is a secret plot to kill people on Medicare.

This is now become an ongoing strategic conundrum. How do you plan to win an argument with opponents who are undeterred by being disproven? Undeterred by the facts, when you don‘t even believe that they believe what they‘re arguing anymore?

It‘s not even just the “death panels” nonsense now. Take Medicare itself, a program Republicans have railed against since before President Johnson signed it into law in 1965. They railed against it since then until—well, until now.

Now, in the Senate Finance Committee, Republicans are trying to portray themselves as the champions of Medicare. They‘re fighting hard to kill any bill that contains any cuts in Medicare, even though people who support Medicare like, say, the AARP, say those cuts won‘t affect care.

Republicans defending Medicare. What would Ronald Reagan say? These guys do remember Ronald Reagan, don‘t they?

Here‘s what he did say about Medicare when it was just a twinkle in some socialist, fascist, freedom-hating, community-organizing Democrat‘s eye.

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Turning to Sarah Palin to explain the international economy and the role of government is like asking a dog why it likes to lick its rear end. But as an audience of investors and fund managers learned today in Hong Kong, Palin's cartoon-quality conservative platitudes don't merely fly in the face of the consensus of economic analysts. As a flashback to her catastrophic interview with Katie Couric reveals, Sarah Palin doesn't even agree with herself.

Palin's rewriting of history begins with the causes of the global economic meltdown. While the villains behind the calamity are many (see, for example, Time and the New York Times' excellent series, "The Reckoning"), for Sarah Palin there is only one. As the Wall Street Journal summed up her closed-door remarks:

"We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place," the former Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate said Wednesday at a conference sponsored by investment firm CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. "We're not interested in government fixes, we're interested in freedom," she added.

Of course, those "government fixes" were not only badly need to stem the financial crisis, they've already paid huge dividends in reversing the slide of American gross domestic product (GDP), refilling empty state coffers and preserving up to a million jobs. As the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal put it three weeks ago:

"Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter -- something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus."

And during the 2008 campaign, then Governor Palin agreed about the need for government intervention. In her own confused and incoherent way, Palin defended to Katie Couric one year ago this week the kind of government bailouts she now decries. The benefits from $700 billion plan she and running John McCain endorsed, she insisted, all fall "under the umbrella of job creation."

"Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy- Helping the -- Oh, it's got to be about job creation too. Shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans."

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Thank God for Joe Conason, who's a consistent champion of the poor and working class. He writes about the trumped-up hysteria about ACORN - and says Republicans who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones:

[...] ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Perhaps the congressional investigation now demanded by some Republican politicians would be a useful exercise, if conducted impartially. A fair investigation might begin to dispel some of the wild mythology promoted by right-wing media outlets.

Among the most popular canards on the right, repeated constantly by conservative pundits and politicians, is that ACORN has been found guilty of engaging in deliberate voter fraud, using federal funds. In reality, ACORN has registered close to 2 million low-income citizens across the country over the past five years -- a laudable record with a very low incidence of fraud of any kind.

Over the past several years, a handful of ACORN employees have admitted falsifying names and signatures on registration cards, in order to boost the pay they received. When ACORN officials discovered those cases, they informed the state authorities and turned in the miscreants. (That was why the Bush Justice Department's blatant attempt to smear ACORN with rushed, election-timed indictments became a national scandal for Republicans rather than Democrats.) The proportion of fraud is infinitesimal. For example, a half-dozen ACORN workers were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election. They had completed fewer than two dozen false registrations -- out of more than a million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. The mythology that suggests that thousands or even millions of illegal registrants voted is itself a fraud.

If only the Republicans who have worked up a frenzy over ACORN's alleged crimes were so indignant about real and damaging voter fraud -- such as the amazing case of Young Political Majors, the firm that ran GOP registration efforts in California, Massachusetts, Florida, Arizona and elsewhere before the authorities in Orange County, Calif., busted its president, Mark Anthony Jacoby, and sent him to jail last year. He had built a lucrative partisan career by teaching his minions to deceive thousands of voters into registering as Republicans rather than Democrats, among other scams. Of course, the only on-air mention of the Young Political Majors scandal on Fox News was made by blogger Brad Friedman -- and the national media, mainstream and conservative, generally ignored it. They were too busy generating "controversy" over ACORN.

So now the overhyped voting registration tales are metastasizing into wild accusations about ACORN's finances and programs, including claims that the group will receive billions in federal bailout funding and that it is a hotbed of corruption, perhaps even murder. In fact, ACORN affiliates -- those not involved with voter registration -- have received a few million dollars annually in federal funding. The group is not scheduled to receive any bailout money (although working people would probably benefit more from subsidizing ACORN than greasing AIG and Goldman Sachs).

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I agree with Leo Gerard. This is at least a step in the right direction with our trade laws.

SCHULTZ: Welcome back to THE ED SHOW. Tomorrow, President Obama will head to Pittsburgh to speak to union leaders at the annual AFL-CIO conference. Labor is fired up. I was there last night, had a radio town hall meeting. They‘re expecting a lot from President Obama.

The union‘s got a big victory from the Obama White House over the weekend, when the president agreed to impose temporary tariffs on tires imported from China. Union leaders say cheap Chinese tires have cost American jobs and shut down plants, and putting an import tax on them will level the playing field for American workers.

Joining me now is Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers International. Mr. Gerard, good to have you with us tonight. How bold a move was this by President Obama to go ahead and uphold the U.S. International Trade Commission‘s ruling on this? This is something the Bush administration did not do. How bold is this in your opinion?

LEO GERARD, UNITED STEELWORKERS INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT: I think it was a very important step, very important move. In fact, this is the first time a president has brought meaning for sanctions against a foreign—a foreign country since Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan did it twice. So I‘m pleased that President Obama stepped in.

We believe that this is a rule-base country. We went to the International Trade Commission and said, China‘s breaking the rules. They agreed. Now President Obama‘s agreed. I‘m very pleased.

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The stupid, it hurts. From the LA Times- Glenn Beck and the Society for (In)sanity in Art:

Last night Fox News ranter Glenn Beck went off on the art made more than 70 years ago for Rockefeller Center, corporate headquarters of NBC and -- not coincidentally -- supposed arch-enemy of Rupert Murdoch's television empire. To the surprise of no one, but to the great amusement of the blogosphere (here, here and here) -- Beck donned his art critic's tin-foil conspiracy hat to find hidden evidence of "progressives, fascists and communists" in the carved reliefs and paintings of a landmark Manhattan building complex that was made a national historic monument in 1987. (Let's see; who was president that year? Oh, yeah: Commie-symp Ronald Reagan.)

How nutty did Beck get? As nutty as usual. He pointed to a portrait of Lenin in Mexican master Diego Rivera's destroyed Rockefeller lobby mural, "Man at the Crossroads," but forgot to mention that old John D. had the mural removed because of it. (Facts are stubborn things -- even more stubborn than demagoguery.) With comedy stylings like that, Beck is turning out to be the Harold Harby of our day.

Who was Harold Harby? A Los Angeles city councilman in the early 1950s, Harby took up propaganda-arms with a paranoid group of right-wing loonies called the Society for Sanity in Art. They made it their patriotic duty to search out Communist symbols they just knew were hidden in that weird, postwar abstract art.

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And here he finishing up his rant about MSNBC.

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Chris Matthews and his panel of Joan Walsh and Jonathan Alter talk about the Republicans' bad case of A.D.D. where they're already carping that the Democrats had better not use Ted Kennedy's death to push through health care/insurance reform. Heaven forbid what's good for Ronnie Raygun might be good for Ted Kennedy as well.

Matthews: Let me ask you about this attempt at foot steps here on the part of the right to interrupt this in a way, I called them ghouls a few minutes ago..

Walsh: Yeah.

Matthews: ..ah, grave robbers. They're trying to get into this story by saying the Democrats are going to do a "win one for the Gipper"...well do me if Audie Murphy served this country and was fighting for us, we'd say, well let's try to do something as well. Let's try to be equally courageous.

If somebody dies in a battle you say, let's try to carry it on, carry the banner forward. That seems to be very, American. They're turning that on the right as some kind of "well, you'd better not try that".

Alter: We've seen this before. The year was 1964. John F. Kennedy has been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson said let's pass the Civil Rights Act as a memorial to the slain president.

Matthews: Let it continue.

Walsh: Right.

Alter: And the right wing at that time said that it was inproper. The bill was passed and Ted Kennedy told me once that it was one of the top three accomplishments of the United States Senate in you know, all the years that he was there in the Civil Rights Act of '64.

Walsh: Well of course it was and you know passing a great health reform bill would be another signature accomplishment and he deserves it. And no one's dictating what should be in the bill, but to accuse, to say that's playing politics is just ridiculous. That is what the man stood for.

Matthews: Isn't it funny that people have memories that are so slight. The A.D.D. that overcomes them? Not in a clinical or medical sense, but just in a political sense. How many times in our lives in the last twenty or so years have you heard the phrase "win one for the Gipper"?

Walsh: Right.

Matthews: It's hilarious. It's a hoot, and now they're saying "don't do what we do".

The fear just doesn't stop, and it didn't stop in 1961. Before he was governor, Ronald Reagan was busy stirring up fears of Socialized Medicine, terrifying people into believing any sort of Public Health Care was a direct product of communism and government meddling.

And so, when the Medicare debate began during its first incarnation in 1961 (the bill was defeated owing to just these scare tactics and the influence of the Dixiecrats - the precursor to our Blue Dogs), people like Ronald Reagan flocked to the cause of the Insurance lobby, big Pharma and the AMA with the sole intent of scaring the living crap out of every human being within the United States.

And so the fear in 1961, as now is a misguided attempt at keeping the status quo pure by stamping out any thought an alternative may exist.

Ain't it all grand?

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Lawrence O'Donnell talks to Joe Califano about Medicare's inception and Ronald Reagan's opposition to it. O'Donnell replays part of a propoganda video made by Reagan for the AMA from back in 1963 warning of the dangers of socialism if Medicare passed. As O'Donnell noted, later when Reagan ran for President, he was not campaigning to abolish Medicare despite his previous opposition to it.

Califano, the former special assistant to Lyndon Johnson takes us through the history of what it took to get Medicare passed.

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Bill pulls out an old record made by none other than the Republicans favorite, St. Ronnie from back in 1961, speaking out against the dangers of socialized medicine, and has a bit of fun with it. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Bill Moyers weighs in on the right wing screechers crying about the possibility of the Fairness Doctrine being brought back. I think the bigger issue is media consolidation, which Bill has addressed in other shows, but did not do so here. Those complaining about the possibility of the Fairness Doctrine coming back will always have the biggest megaphone until these companies are broken up, and media ownership rules are revised.

Moyers: Do I think any conservative commentator wished for what happened in Knoxville last year, or to Doctor George Tiller in Wichita two months ago? Not for a minute. The killer who pulled the trigger is the guilty party. But do I wish the vendors of venom, and their sponsors, would think harder about how angry words become accomplices of foul deeds? Yes, I do. Most certainly. Especially as the words and crazy theories of militias and other elements of the lunatic fringe are given even a shred of credibility by their repetition in the conspicuous conservative media. God only knows the price we pay when we turn political opponents to be debated, into mortal enemies to be eliminated.

Now, when some of those who shout through the megaphone of right wing radio hear a critique like this, they immediately throw a fit. They claim that people like me are calling for a return to the Fairness Doctrine. Some of you remember the Fairness Doctrine, adopted 60 years ago by the Federal Communications Commission. It said that opposing points of view had to be presented on radio or TV in a way that was honest, equitable and balanced. If not, said the FCC, a station could lose its license.

Ronald Reagan abolished the doctrine in 1987, but mention it today and the Rush Limbaugh's of the world still scream like martyrs being stretched on the rack. These people earn millions inciting riots in the public mind. If they were required to be fair, they would soon be penniless, out on the street, cup in hand. So when we first telecast our report on the killings in Knoxville last year, some of them threw a tantrum, as if our criticism of their malicious rhetoric was a call for government censorship.

It's true that in this current climate of mean-speak some members of congress and others have called for reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. But I'm not one of them. The Doctrine is a throwback to a time when there were a lot fewer ways to hear news and opinion than there are in today's universe of websites, blogs, and tweets. Just last week, the two new commissioners to the FCC expressed their strong opposition to its restoration. The new FCC chairman is opposed, too.

Conservatives nonetheless wave the fallacious threat of its return as a bloody flag, lofted above the straw men they evoke to roil the faithful and keep the cash registers ringing.

So let me say it again: the first amendment protection of a free press extends to The Savage Nation as surely as it does to The Nation magazine. Anyway, you can't coerce taste; fairness is not a doctrine to be enforced, but a choice to be made, a responsibility to be honored.

That's it for this week, but the Journal continues at our website. Log onto PBS.org and click on Bill Moyers Journal, where you can find out more about the history of talk radio and free speech and follow the debate on health care reform.

I'm Bill Moyers. See you next time.