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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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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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Conservative columnist George Will on Sunday suggested that President Barack Obama could be impeached after it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeted tea party groups.

The Associated Press learned last week that the IRS had apologized for what it was an "inappropriate" investigation into whether tea party groups were abusing their tax-exempt status.

"How stupid do they think we are?" Will asked during an ABC News panel on Sunday. "Just imagine... if the George W. Bush administration had IRS underlings, out in Cincinnati of course, saying we're going to target groups with the word ' 'progressive' in their title. We would have all hell breaking loose."

"This is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate summer," he added, reading a passage from former President Richard Nixon's articles of impeachment.

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

"I think it would be irresponsible to start talking about impeachment over this," Democratic strategist Donna Brazile replied. "Clearly, there was some incompetence at some level or bureaucrats looking into all these applications in a rush after Citizens United [Supreme Court ruling] to see whether or not they were legitimate organizations with the word 'tea party' or 'patriot' in it. Yeah, there are progressive patriots as well."

"Given what George has just said, you better get ready for your audit," ABC News White House correspondent Jonathan Karl quipped to Will.

"The IRS commissioner was a Republican appointed by [former President George W.] Bush, who his term expired in November," Brazile pointed out.

There is no evidence that President Obama directed or even knew of the targeting of tea party groups.

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From ABC's This Week, Sen. Jeff Sessions was happy to do a little fearmongering over the effect of more legal immigration on our economy and cites a flawed study from a right-wing anti-immigration group while doing it. Republican Senator Blatantly Lies and Claims More Legal Immigration Is Bad for the Economy :

The conflict within the Republican Party on immigration was fully exposed when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made the opposite point on Fox News Sunday, “When with we reform our legal immigration system, we get these people that are already here now paying their taxes and not taking anything out of the system, this will be a net positive for the country economically now and in the future.”

Rubio was making the argument to his fellow Republicans that they can get something for nothing by increasing legal immigration, but both liberal and conservative analysts agree that adding more legal immigrants will be good for the economy.

Sen. Sessions was relying on a paper from the anti-immigrant Center For Immigration Studies (CIS). The right wing group arrived at their conclusion that immigration reform would have a net negative impact by not counting the 11 million immigrants that already illegally in the country.

Republicans like Jeff Sessions are preaching to a vanishing choir. Read on...

As Sen. Chuck Schumer rightfully explained during the segment, what's driving down wages are those working in the shadows right now. Republicans like Sessions don't want a path to legalization for these immigrants because they don't want them voting and they like the cheap labor for business. I don't pretend to know what the legislation is going to look like that comes out of the Senate this week, but I do have no doubt that whatever their starting point is, Republicans will do their part to muck up the works and make it worse.

Full transcript below the fold.

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The pediatric neurosurgeon who shocked Washington by using his speech at the non-partisan National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month to suggest that the Bible calls for a flat tax now says that God might tell him to run for president in 2016.

In doing so, he joins a long list of Republicans who claim to converse with the Almighty and take their marching orders from above.

As President Barack Obama sat just a few feet away, Dr. Ben Carson went on a 27-minute rant about political correctness and how Biblical "tithing" would make a better tax system. Fox News quickly heaped praise on Carson, while other conservative outlets like The Wall Street Journal and World Net Daily called for a presidential bid.

In a Sunday morning appearance on ABC News, Carson suggested that a White House run wasn't out of the question if that was what God wanted.

"It's not my intention to do that," Carson told ABC's Jonathan Karl. "But as I always say in every part of my life, I'll leave that up to God."

Karl also asked the famed doctor what he thought of President Obama "as a leader."

"I think he's a very talented politician," Carson hedged after a short pause. "There are a number of policies that I don't believe lead to the growth of our nation and don't lead to the elevation of our nation."

"But what I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not just people casting aspersions at each other," he remarked. "I mean, it's unbelievable to me the way that people act like third graders, and if somebody doesn't agree with them, 'they're this' or 'they're that' -- and it comes from both sides and it's so infantile."

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Given he's from New York and has done more than his share to make sure our government policies are friendly to Wall Street, the big banks and the hedge fund managers, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Chuck Schumer take his fellow Senator, Jon Kyl to task for trying to pretend that you're going to hurt a lot of small businesses if you raise taxes on those making over $250,000 a year.

I've heard this argument so many times from Republicans, it's ridiculous and ABC This Week host Jonathan Karl wasn't much better than Kyl here with trying to pretend like you're going to damage the economy if the wealthiest among us have their taxes go up a few percentage points for their income over a quarter of a million dollars.

KARL:  But I've got to ask you about this question about -- because this is one of the big sticking points left, is whose taxes go up?  Is it people making over $250,000, as the president wants, or Republicans suggested nobody, or people making over a $1 million?
 
But you, Senator Schumer, had proposed raising taxes only on those making over $1 million.  And I want to take a look at what you said about this proposal, going at $250,000.  This was last year.  You said, "In the eyes of many, it is hard to ask households making $250,000 or $300,000 a year -- in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that is associated with wealth.  It also would affect too many small businesses." 
 
Weren't you right back then, when you said it was wrong to raise taxes on those...
 
(CROSSTALK) 
 
SCHUMER:  Well, look, we offered that to our Republican colleagues two years ago, when the political landscape was different.  They rejected it.  And then the president, sticking to $250,000, campaigned on it openly, overtly.  He won the election on it overwhelmingly on that issue; 60 percent of the public was with him. 
 
So that is our position.  It's a position that brings in more revenues.  And what we have learned, as the fiscal situation deteriorated, if you go much higher than $250,000, to raise the rest of the revenues you need, you're going to hurt the middle class as you take away their tax deductions.  So it's the right place...
 
KARL:  But you said back then...
 
SCHUMER:  ... to be.
 
KARL:  But you said back then it would affect too many small businesses.  Frankly, you sounded a little like Senator Kyl. 
 
SCHUMER:  Well, the bottom line is very, very simple, and that is that if you do -- if you go much above $250,000, you're going to hurt the middle class even worse and small businesses even worse by having to take away tax deductions.  That's not the place we were at two years ago.  It is the place we're at now, because the situation is deteriorating. 
 
KYL:  Jonathan, it's exactly the opposite.  The higher you set that level, the less small business you're going to hit.  And you're exactly right, and Chuck was right back when he talked about a million, because the increase in the tax rates for individual taxpayers sweeps in about a million small-business owners.  Remember, about half of small businesses are women-owned.  And it sweeps them up because they don't pay corporate tax rates; they pay as individuals. 
 
KARL:  But -- but...
 
SCHUMER:  Wait a second.  That's counting big hedge funds as small businesses, big Hollywood productions, like Oprah Winfrey, as small businesses.  It affects very few.  We all know mom-and-pop small businesses, the dry cleaner down the street and others, don't make millions and millions of dollars.

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From ABC's This Week, GOP Representative and flamethrower Raul Labrador took a page out of Charles Krauthammer's book, and blamed the Democrats for the rifts within the Republican party and compared them to bank robbers while saying their plan is to raise taxes on everybody. Never mind that the party protecting the tax cuts for the ultra-rich at all costs is the Republicans.

Of course when host Jonathan Karl pointed out that the Republicans haven't been willing to compromise on anything, Labrador disagreed and said he'd be perfectly willing to compromise... as long as it means the GOP getting everything they want, which is destroying our social safety nets.

KARL: So let's -- but I want to ask, Republicans seem to be incredibly divided on this issue of taxes. You wouldn't even support your leader. You wouldn't even support Speaker Boehner, a relatively modest increase of those making over $1 million.

Charles Krauthammer said that this is -- Republicans are basically completely divided on this. Here's what he said: President Obama's been using this -- and I must say with great skill and ruthless skill and success -- to fracture and basically shatter the Republican opposition. His objective from the very beginning was to break the will of Republicans in the House and to create an internal civil war, and he has done that.

Is that what we are seeing here, is an internal civil war...

LABRADOR: Absolutely.

KARL: ... in the House?

LABRADOR: And I agree with Charles. This -- this has been what the Democrats wanted to do from day one. They have tried to divide the Republicans. They have tried to get us to fight against each other on taxes when -- I'm not really sure that they don't want to go over the fiscal cliff.

You're going to have Howard Dean here a little bit later. He agrees with many Democrats that what -- what they need is actually more revenue. They want to expand the growth of government. They need more revenues. You know, Democrats are like bank robbers. You don't have the money in the 2 percent -- the money is in the 100 percent. They want to raise taxes on everyone.

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: But you're unwilling...

(CROSSTALK)

KARL: ... you're unwilling to compromise at all.

LABRADOR: I'm willing to compromise if we have real cuts.

KARL: Not on taxes.

LABRADOR: No, if we have real cuts -- because what happens in Washington is that we talk about raising taxes today and then we talk about cuts 10 years from now. It happened under Reagan, it happened under Bush, and it's what's going to happen to us once again.

h/t Mediaite

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Last week, it was Barbara Walters on The View asking Callista Gingrich what she thought about Gen. David Petraeus resigning over his affair. I guess the network decided they hadn't embarrassed themselves enough already, because this Sunday, guess who was the first person asked about the Petraeus affair during the panel segment on This Week. You guessed it -- Newt Gingrich.

Why a professional "scam artist" like Gingrich is a regular guest on these shows in the first place is beyond me, but then, I could say the same thing about most of the guests that are chosen to go on these shows week after week and one George Will who is on this show almost every single week.

Although we did get a break from Will last week. Probably because he didn't want to be asked any questions about his brilliant prediction of a Mitt Romney electoral blowout.

RADDATZ: I think we've made that pretty clear right here. I think we've made that pretty clear. Let's move on to Dave Petraeus. You know he was in these hearings. We have -- we thought this might calm down this week; it has not.

Let me start with you, Speaker Gingrich. Is it a national security risk to have your CIA director involved in an extramarital affair?

GINGRICH: Well, I think Petraeus concluded -- and I think he's probably right -- that he couldn't be effective. I mean, I think what he did is he...

RADDATZ: You don't think it was because he got caught?

GINGRICH: Well, that's what made him ineffective. I mean, I think by definition, if something had remained secret, it would have been secret. He would have had no reason to confront it.

RADDATZ: But the president actually spent 24 hours thinking about it.

GINGRICH: But I think Petraeus, in offering his resignation, was communicating that he didn't think he could lead the CIA, he didn't think he could deal with the Congress, and that he would be consumed -- you're much better off to have people saying, "Gee, he's a great patriot. Isn't it a pity he's gone?", than to have people say, "Let me focus on this, why isn't he gone?"

And I think, from his perspective, he'd have been in a very, very difficult position, if he stayed in office.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I think poor Paul Krugman should have gotten hazard pay for having to appear on the set with Mary Matalin and Peggy Noonan and being tag teamed by their hackery at the same time. ABC's George Stephanopoulos called it a "great round table" when this debacle was over. I've got news for you George. There are a lot of words you could use for this panel segment, most of which I can't use here because we like to keep the site safe for work, but "great" isn't one of them.

Book-ended around the portion of the segment where Mary Matalin was raging on and calling Paul Krugman a liar, we were also treated to Peggy Noonan attempting to do a rewrite on Mitt Romney's policies after he flip flopped again during the first debate and her pretending he worked well with the other side of the aisle as Governor of Massachusetts. She ran up against both Krugman and ABC's Johnathan Karl calling her out for her nonsense, but when Karl brought up the fact that he set a record for the number of vetoes, she just shrugged it off.

Heaven forbid any reality is allowed to be acknowledged if it gets in the way of their talking points.

Transcript below the fold of Noonan doing her best to get the Etch-a-Sketch out for Mitt Romney and his debate performance.

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