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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Sunday insisted that a tragic massacre at Sandy Forks Elementary School in Connecticut could have been prevented if Principal Dawn Hochsprung had been armed with an M4 carbine, an assault rifle designed by the U.S. military for urban warfare.

During an interview on Sunday, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Gohmert if he still believed that the country would be safer if more people were armed as he had said after a mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado earlier this year.

"Every mass killing of more than three people in recent history has been in a place where guns were prohibited -- except for one," the Texas Republican explained. "They choose this place, they know no one will be armed."

Gohmert became emotional as he continued: "You know, having been and judge and having reviewed photographs of these horrific scenes and knowing that children have these defensive wounds -- gunshots through their arms and hands as they try to protect themselves -- and hearing the heroic stories the principal, lunging trying to protect -- Chris, I wish to God she had had an M4 in her office locked up. So, when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn't have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids."

Wallace noted that when the Second Amendment was written, weapons like the AR-15 Adam Lanza used to kill 20 children last week -- which can shoot up to five rounds in a second -- did not exist.

"These were created for law enforcement, these were created for the military," Wallace observed. "Why does the average person -- I can understand a hunting rifle, I can understand and handgun -- why do they need these weapons of mass destruction?"

"Well, for the reason George Washington said: a free people should be an armed people," Gohmert replied. "It insures against the tyranny of the government if they know that the biggest army is the American people then you don't have the tyranny that came from King George."

"Once you start drawing the line, when do you stop?" he wondered. "You use your head and you look at the facts."

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Conservative radio host Glenn Beck asked his listeners on Wednesday to consider Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum because he could be "the next George Washington."

"I don’t endorse candidates, I don't get involved in politics," the former Fox News host declared. "Rick Santorum is a friend of mine, but I choose my friends carefully and I would never tell you someone was a friend of mine if I didn’t have great respect for them."

"People ask me all the time, ‘who is out there?’ I tell them the same thing, I don’t trust any of them, but if I had to trust the reins of power with one person that is currently in this field and, because I think the next president has got to be Abraham Lincoln," he continued.

"The temptation and the pressure is going to be absolutely enormous. If there is one guy out there that is the next George Washington, the only guy that I could think of is Rick Santorum. I would ask that you would take a look at him."

By the end of the day, Santorum had emailed the video to supporters, asking them to donate at least $30 to his struggling campaign.

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Chris Matthews had on wingnut Rick-Gather-Your-Armies Barber to explain his extremely over the top campaign ads and managed to take down another teabagger by just asking him very simple questions about what he meant to say in his ads and what his policies are and the man showing himself to be incapable of defending himself. It looked like shooting fish in a barrel and I'm really surprised he thought it was a good idea to go on the air with Matthews. I have quite a few grievances with Tweety and his brand of "journalism" or whatever you want to call it, but making wingnuts look like the incoherent asses they are as he did in this segment isn't one of them.

MATTHEWS: Republican House candidate Rick Barber of Alabama came out with an ad earlier this month that got a lot of buzz. The spot begins partway through an imagined meeting with founding father Sam Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington.

(CUT TO VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Mr. Barber, that’s quite an ad.

Let me ask you, what -- the -- the first part struck me is, "I would impeach him."

Well, who would you impeach and for what? Which president?

BARBER: It’s not necessarily meant for a president. We would have said president if that’s who we intended.

It’s a metaphor to the fact that we don’t seem to want to hold our leaders accountable. We have got leaders that are doing illegal acts, that are not representing the people. And we don’t seem to want to use the tools that are there -- impeachment is one of them -- to hold them accountable.

MATTHEWS: Well, they have committed illegal acts. What are they? Which presidents committed illegal acts?

BARBER: Well, you’ve got...

MATTHEWS: We have had the progressive income tax since 1913. Have all the presidents since then been committing illegal acts?

BARBER: Again, you just look back over the years, there are several who have been caught for tax fraud, tax evasion. You’ve got the potential offering of Democratic candidates not to run in replacement for possible high-level offices. There’s a lot of stuff out there. And if anything of it is found to be true, we should hold those people accountable, absolutely.

MATTHEWS: Well, sure. I want to go through what your ad says. You stand by the ad, of course?

BARBER: Absolutely.

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Jonathan Alter made some good points about why the Republicans are being ridiculous going after the White House and Sestak for this trumped up scandal on Real Time. It's criminalizing politics and if you're going to go after Obama and Emanuel for this, then there's a long list behind them to go after as well.

And Patrick Ruffini's tired line about campaign promises is wearing thin. That's not an excuse to scandalize everything and they obviously don't hold their own politicians to the same standard. As our team member Jamie pointed out to everyone when he was watching this last night "It's funny though that no one mentions how George W. Bush was going to 'restore the integrity of the Oval Office', and we all see how that went." Ain't that the truth.

I like Bill Maher's suggestion for a compromise at the end of the clip.

Alter: George H.W. Bush's political director Ron Kaufman said recently that if this was a crime that every president going back to George Washington, should go to jail. This has been done in politics forever. It will always be done in politics and there's actually nothing wrong with it. Nobody's ever been prosecuted under this.

Ruffini: Here's the problem.

Maher: Do you agree with that.

Ruffini: Wasn't Obama supposed to be different? I mean wasn't the... the Bush administration was hyper-political. They were using their political office to fire, you know, supposedly fire the US Attorneys...

Maher: And they did.

Ruffini: ...and instead, you know, we were basically... when Obama got in we were going to put all the politics over at the DNC, get it out of the White House...

Alter: Who said that?

Ruffini: ...and then you have Rahm Emanuel...

Maher: But that's not really... now wait a second. That's not really (crosstalk) that's not really a good analogy. Firing the federal prosecutors, okay, a federal prosecutor, a non-political job with a very important function, okay? This is, this is politics. This is people on your own team. This is one Democrat saying to another Democrat, "Maybe you'd be better over here and we'll elect this guy"...

Alter: Patrick your man Ronald Reagan about twenty years ago, his political director Ed Rollins actually bragged in the newspaper that they were trying to get Senator Hayakawa from CA to not run for reelection by offering him a federal job. It's just, to politicize, to criminalize politics is insane. (crosstalk)

Ruffini: But Obama had held himself up to a higher standard I think during his campaign.

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Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin's irony alert buttons are broken. Palin praises the founding fathers and George Washington as someone "who will serve for the right reasons because they're reluctant to get out there and seek a limelight and seek power" and who "will not prostitute themselves" and then Glenn Beck says Palin fits that ticket. There was a whole lot of stupid packed into this hour long interview Beck did with Palin, but this portion had to be some of the worst of it.

BECK: I don't think you can go to Washington and not lose your soul. I've never met somebody who went to Washington and came back and I said, wow, you're a better person. Have you?

PALIN: Come to think of it, I don't know if I have, Glenn.

BECK: How do you — because the parties, the system is so infected, how do you, as an individual go in — I'm not asking if you're going to run. But let's just say you were going to run. How do you go in and how do I as voter know that you're not going to cut so many side deals to get that power that by the time you had that power, you're no longer who we needed?

PALIN: I think a voter first need to sincerely know and it sounds impossible, but sincerely knows who that candidate is to see what their track record and to see if they had lost their soul along the way.

BECK: We're not even talking about track record anymore. We're not talking about how did you vote? We're talking about trust. How do you restore trust and honor, how do we even know anymore?

PALIN: That is what everybody is asking. That is what those who are conscientious and concerned about America are asking and those who are so disenchanted and disgusted with Washington, D.C., I don't have that answer. I'm asking the same thing. How do we know that we can trust what is going on in the White House? The White House!

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