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It would be nice to see the Republicans called out like this more often for being willing to sabotage their own government if they don't get their way or like the results of the last election. Chris Matthews called them out for just that during his "let me finish" segment on this Tuesday's Hardball: Obama, not the GOP, wants to keep government working:

Let me finish tonight with this.

I think the difference between the Democrats and Republicans is getting as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Watch how they do it:

President Obama wants to keep the government running. Republicans threaten to stop it. It’s relentless. The fiscal “abyss,” the “debt ceiling,” the “sequester,” the end of the “continuing resolution.” Different words, different deadlines, all detonate the same explosion. Threaten to crash the government if you don’t like the way it’s doing something if you don’t like who the American voter has elected.

Isn’t this what the Republicans did back in the old days? If you don’t like government—Guatemala, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Chile—just bring it down.

Guess what? The Republicans are now using that tactic here at home. If they don’t like who’s been elected, they find some way to undermine it, discredit its leaders, whatever it takes to destroy it. We’re using the ways of the old Cold War CIA to destabilize our own country.

Look at the impact these constant threats to shutdown the government are having on public confidence. It’s undermining it, making people forever nervous about the basic ability of America to even have a government.

Is that patriotic? I don’t think so.

Now if we could just get his producers to spare us from the sort of "fair and balanced" discussion he had on the same topic earlier in the program with Michael Steele laughing at the notion that his party behaves this way even though it's obvious he knows full well it's true, and freaking "Fix the Debt" Ed Rendell supposedly representing the left -- maybe we'd be getting somewhere.

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On this Labor Day weekend, the topic of Labor Day was hardly mentioned on the Sunday shows, which were of course dominated by Republicans - as is par for the course week after week as to who the networks decide to bring on the air to frame the political debates for the upcoming week. One exception was CNN's State of the Union where Candy Crowley talked to the Teamsters President Jim Hoffa about his take on what we need to do to solve the unemployment problem in America.

Hoffa would like to see something akin to a WPA program, and for President Obama to call out these so-called American companies for their patriotism for hiring cheap labor overseas rather than putting Americans to work and for sitting on hordes of cash instead of putting that money back into the economy.

Transcript via CNN:

CROWLEY: Here to talk about what unions want for the economy and from President Obama, Jim Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union with 1.4 million members, I think I have that right.

So you have met with the president recently. You're going to see him again tomorrow on the sort of traditional Labor Day Detroit event. What you have told him that you want to see in a jobs bill?

HOFFA: We want a bold plan. Labor wants a bold program that's going to rebuild America.

CROWLEY: Does that mean something expensive? Usually when people say, oh, I want a bold plan, it means something that pours a lot of money.

HOFFA: The answer is, it's going to challenge America. I mean, so far what we've done hasn't worked. We're still at 9 percent. So it's not working. We need a bold plan. We have to look what happened with Irene. Look, we have to rebuild our roads, you know, basically our dams, our highways, everything has got to be redone.

You know, our schools, we have got to start that. We need a WPA- type program. But most of all, what I think he has got to do is to challenge business. You know, this is not something that -- you know, labor needs everybody to be in the game.

And what is happening is everybody is saying, what is Obama going to do? And what obligation does American business have? They are sitting on trillions of dollars right now. They're not spending money. We have lost 8 million jobs since '08, and we have got to start challenging them to get into the game.

So another faction of what he should be doing is putting in some type of a tax incentive to get them to spend money to get off the sidelines, get into the game and start spending some of that money here in America and put America back to work.

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I've got a lot of issues with America's foreign policy and our military interventions and was extremely wary about the U.S. getting involved in Libya. That said, I agree with Ed Schultz here and calling out Republicans for their double-speak after the fall of Tripoli. As Ed noted at the end of the segment, the Republicans only want to wrap themselves in a flag on foreign policy matters when we have a Republican in the White House.

Here's more on some of the recent reaction from Republicans now that we've got a Democrat in the White House instead. From TPM -- Barack Who? GOP 2012 Candidates Respond To Qaddafi’s Fall By Writing Obama Out Of History:

The main GOP presidential candidates' responses to events in Libya were strikingly diverse. However, one factor they had in common was the lack of any mention of one person: the President who actually committed US forces to the conflict.

The exception to this was former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. "Ridding the world of the likes of Gadhafi is a good thing," he wrote. "But this indecisive President had little to do with this triumph."

That was in line with a rather churlish press release put out Sunday night by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), which bemoaned that Qaddafi's fall took "so long" because a certain someone wouldn't "employ the full weight of our airpower."

Still, at least this line of approach gave Obama a look-in. For the other candidates (repeating their tactics after the death of bin Laden) the President may as well have not existed.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who condemned the Libya action from the start, issued a statement acknowledging this disagreement: Read on...

And as Schultz pointed out as well, can you imagine the rhetoric we'd have been hearing from the GOP had this been George W. Bush who'd possibly brought down Gadhafi instead? As he noted, all we have to do is go back and see how they acted when the United States invaded Iraq for a few clues.

And for more on McCain and Graham, here's D-Day's take -- Neocon Twins McCain and Graham Sad About Troubling Lack of Airstrikes In Libya In February and March.