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Chris Hayes and his panel members Reihan Salam, Maria Hinojosa, Nancy Cohen and Kai Wright discussed the potential implications for presidential hopeful Rick Santorum's campaign after the release of this audio from 2008 uncovered by Right Wing Watch.

Santorum: Satan is Systematically Destroying America:

Back in 2008, Rick Santorum traveled to Ave Maria University in Florida to deliver an address to students attending the Catholic university founded by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan which he moved from Michigan as part of his effort to build his own personal theocracy in Naples.

Santorum told the students at Ave Maria how lucky they were to be living in a time when God's Army is more needed than ever because all of the major institutions in society were under attack by Satan.

The audio of Santorum's remarks is still posted on the Ave Maria website and the bulk of his speech was dedicated to explaining how God had used him, his political career, and even the death of his son Gabriel in the fight to outlaw abortion in America.

But Santorum began his remarks by explaining to the students in attendance how every institution in America has been destroyed by Satan; from academia to politics with even the church having fallen under His sway - not the Catholic church, of course, but "mainline Protestantism" which is in such "shambles" that it is not even Christian any longer:

You can read the full transcript in their post. Here's more from Think Progress -- Santorum Excommunicates 45 Million Christians: Mainline Protestants Are ‘Gone From The World Of Christianity’:

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Rep. Jerrold Nadler joined the set of Chris Hayes' new show, Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC this Sunday morning to talk about President Obama's proposal to increase the tax rate on millionaires and a bill he's going to be introducing this week that should end this hostage taking we've seen from Republicans on the debt ceiling.

Here's more from The Hill on that -- House Dems introduce bill to eliminate debt ceiling:

Three congressional Democrats are introducing a bill Wednesday that would abolish the federal debt ceiling. The lawmakers say that the recent debate to raise the ceiling and avoid default had a "disastrous" effect on the U.S economy, and that the legislation would keep parties from using a potential default as a hostage in future budget debates.

"The debt ceiling is truly arbitrary and has nothing to do with the deficit," Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said in a statement last Wednesday. "The debt ceiling does not prevent the United States from incurring new debts. That occurs when Congress decides to authorize more spending than revenues. The debt ceiling prevents the president from borrowing money to pay those debts when they come due."

Virginia Democrat Jim Moran and Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson will join Nadler in introducing the legislation. But the bill is unlikely to gain traction, especially in the Republican-controlled House. Members of the GOP were encouraged that they were able to use the debt ceiling as leverage to attain deep budget cuts during negotiations with President Obama and the Senate. [...]

“Republicans in Congress have shown they are willing to hold the fate of our economy hostage by using the debt ceiling as a political weapon. It’s a tactic that has far ranging effects, disrupting financial markets, damaging the peoples’ trust in government and delaying consideration of must-pass legislation to create jobs and get our economy back on track," Moran said.

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Chris Matthews asks his panel about one of his favorite topics, how the left wing of the Democratic Party is going to react to more hippie punching and triangulating from President Obama. I think they are underestimating just how sour the mood of the electorate is and the fact that it's not going to get any better if the economy doesn't improve and something isn't done to get people back to work.

As usual with this crowd, the whole conversation amounts to painting going along with corporate or Republican ideas as somehow "centrist" and adult -- and the people who would like more to be done for the working class as out of the main stream. And of course all the dirty f**king hippies will eventually sit down and shut up and do what the adults demand of them. Heaven forbid these guys will ever pass up an opportunity to marginalize liberals.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. In his speech this week in Tucson and in his deals with Republicans in December, President Obama disengaged some say, triangulated from the left. Which brings us to our big question this week and it's a big one. How's the left wing of the Democratic Party going to react to the president distancing himself from them? Andrew.

SULLIVAN: I think with any luck they'll understand that he has pursued a consistent strategy from the beginning to try to be president of both Americas and this is not different. What this did was I think prove the wisdom of that strategy. You keep being a partisan lefty for the last two years, battling them as Paul Krugman and the left have wanted him to do, he would not have had the standing to do what he did this week.

MATTHEWS: Will they be that understanding, or feel dissed?

O'DONNELL: Well the argument will be made that there was a lot done for the left in the last year and it's time to gear up for the election, so it's time for the left to fall in line.

MATTHEWS: And they'll buy it?

O'DONNELL: Probably.

BORGER: You know if you look at the polls 70% of self-identified liberals say that they approve of Barack Obama. So actually he's got a problem with the vocal left and the left of the left, but I think a lot of liberals think he's okay.

SALAM: If you look at any of the issues where you would have expected the left to raise a stink, if you look at Afghanistan, civil liberties, if you look at the incredibly weak financial reform bill we heard absolutely nothing. I think the left has completely acquiescent and they're going to just do pretty much whatever the president wants.

MATTHEWS: Well... such definitive statements.

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Chris Matthews asked his panel on his weekend bobble-head show if this is "the perfect storm to actually reduce the federal debt over time" by which I'm sure he means some Shock Doctrine style cuts to Social Security and privatizing Medicaid by turning it into a voucher system. The panel doesn't think it's going to happen because of course the un-serious liberals don't want any cuts to our social safety nets.

This conversation by our beltway Villagers is becoming tiresome, but they keep having it. Rather than talking about having single payer so that Medicare is not dumping the sickest and most expensive patients onto the government while the insurance companies profit off of the rest of us and instead of talking about lifting the cap on taxable income for Social Security to keep it solvent far into the future and make it a less regressive tax, we get treated to this nonsense.

And if any Democrats are taking Anne Kornblut's talking points seriously that making cuts to Social Security is going to win them any points with independent voters, they're going to find out the hard way that they're sadly mistaken. George Bush thought it would work out for him as well with talk of privatizing Social Security and the more he talked, the more he just pissed off the electorate.

If President Obama and any "moderate" Democrats decide to make cuts to Social Security or raise the retirement age, rather than win anyone over I think they're more likely to completely destroy the party. I also think you'll see liberals moving to third parties and looking for primary challengers in droves.

I just let my Senator know that's how I felt and I hope the rest of you that have Democrats representing you in the House or the Senate who look like they might be promoting the Catfood commissions' co-chairs' recommendations do so as well. They need to hear from their constituents that it's not acceptable to balance the budget off of the backs of the elderly, the middle class and what's left of it and the poor.

Transcript below the fold.

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During the "Tell me something I don't know" segment of The Chris Matthews Show, conservative columnist Reihan Salam suggests that after this dust up over the TSA's invasive searches, the right is suddenly going to start caring about Americans' civil liberties being violated.

SALAM: The conservative backlash against the TSA is just part of a bigger revival of civil liberties talk on the right. We’re going to see a lot more of it in the next year or two.

I'm sure those concerns will end again just exactly as soon as another Republican gets elected president. I'd like to know where their concerns were when the Bush administration was still in power.

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Bill Maher got his right-wing guests -- the National Review's Reihan Salam and Fox News' Margaret Hoover -- on this week's edition of Real Time worked up when he asked why all the recent political violence is coming from the right. Salam reminded me a bit of Howard Fineman on Hardball the other day when he couldn't name anyone on the left who equaled the violence we're seeing from the right either, and reached back to the Weather Underground as an example of a violent group on the left, which Maher pointed out existed before he was born. Fox's Margaret Hoover tried painting Joy Behar with the same brush as the Kentucky head-stomper for her comments on The View, which (as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out) is completely ridiculous.

While I don't agree completely with Bill that if you looked hard enough you couldn't find some example of someone on the left behaving badly because there are a few out there, he's spot on that both sides are not equal and the craziness we've been seeing for the last several years is coming from the right, not the left. I'm surprised neither of them pulled out the faker Kenneth Gladney's story where pretended to get beaten up by members of the SEIU that Dave wrote about here -- Faking victimhood: Just how hurt was that supposed victim of SEIU 'thuggery'?.

The big difference between what's going on now, as I said in the post on Fineman's hackery (and it's a point Maher failed to make), is that this hatred that is being drummed up right now is coming from these astroturf groups funded by big business and from the Republican leadership itself and from right-wing hate-talk radio. These are not just isolated incidents, but ones that are being incited intentionally and drummed up by people who understand full well what they're doing and just don't care about the repercussions. Bill did point out some of the things that Tom Tancredo has said recently and Hoover tried writing him off by saying he's not a Republican any more. Uh-huh.

For a reminder of just how crazy things are getting on the right there are plenty of examples here and here and here and here. And of course there is also John and Dave's book -- Our 'Over the Cliff' website: A resource for progressives coping with insane right-wingers.

Partial transcript below the fold. Bill had me with him during the show until a bit later when he said he's alarmed by the number of babies being named Mohammed in Great Britian. Really Bill?

And one last note, this clip really illustrates a point that Driftglass and Bluegal made in their podcast this week which is that when you confront anyone on the right about how badly their side behaves, their heads explode.

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After playing some of the extreme rhetoric coming from the likes of Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck, Chris Matthews asks what’s driving the hysteria over the so called “ground zero mosque” and the apocalyptic language coming from the likes of Glenn Beck. The National Review's Reihan Salam apparently doesn't think that Rupert Murdoch has any control over Glenn Beck which I'll get to shortly.

Joe Klein says Newt Gingrich is smart enough to know better, which he is, but dismisses Glenn Beck as “something different” and a “paranoid lunatic who is a great entertainer” who is exploiting what always happens when we have a combination of a bad economic situation in the United States coupled with being at war. I agree with Klein that Beck is exploiting a lot of the real fear that is out there with the economy being so terrible right now. I disagree that he’s just some “paranoid lunatic”. Beck knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s happy to be using his fear mongering to enrich himself. He just doesn’t care what type of damage he’s doing in the interim. And I also agree with Klein that Beck is doing this with the full approval of his “puppet master” Rupert Murdoch.

The part of this segment I found really irritating was the National Review’s Reihan Salam and his dismissiveness of Rupert Murdoch’s control over Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck doesn’t do anything on the air without the full approval of his station’s ownership and to pretend he doesn’t is just nonsense.

Matthews: Reihan Salam, this whole thing, I think it gets ethnic, I think it is tribal. I listened to Rush Limbaugh this week saying, you know, we’re not Islamaphobic, we elected Barack Obama. That proves we’re not Islamaphobic. That’s saying he’s Islamic again when the guy’s a Christian.

Salam: I don’t think that’s quite what it’s saying. I think what it’s saying is that Barack Obama is someone who comes from a very different kind of background and Americans have embraced him in large numbers. I also think the idea respectfully that Glenn Beck is… ah… you know… is being controlled by Rupert Murdoch as his puppet master gets things wrong. (crosstalk)

When you look at Glenn Beck you see someone for example, remember Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March. What was the Million Man March about? A lot of people were terrified by that. It caused a lot of consternation among liberals and conservatives. But ultimately what you saw was an event where tons of African American men got together and it was really about identity and pride.

And I think that when you are looking at our politics right now, it’s true that in an economic downturn you see a lot of confusion, you see a lot of uncertainty and there is a decent number of people who feel like now “have nots”, but they feel like “are nots”. They feel like they’re not being respected in our public life and they want to assert themselves….

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