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On this weekend's The Chris Matthews Show, while discussing whether the Obama campaign might attempt to use Mitt Romney's Mormonism against him during the presidential campaign and the trouble Romney has had openly discussing his faith, panel member S.E. Cupp had this explanation for why Romney's religion might not be a problem for him:

CUPP: Second, you know, G.K. Chesterton said that the test of any good religion is whether you can make fun of it or not. And, you know, Mormonism has really come into its own in pop culture, whether you're looking at The Book of Mormon by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or Big Love. I mean, Mormonism, as uneasy as America may have been about it in the past, I think it's having a pretty good day this year in pop culture. Mormons are kind of everywhere. So I don't know that it's as impenetrable and clandestine as it used to be.

I used to think Matthews' show on the weekend couldn't get a whole lot worse with the typical group of beltway Villagers he has as regular guests. I was wrong. This is the second show where he's had Cupp on there. I'm failing to follow the logic here. So somehow, a Broadway musical and a show on a cable premium pay channel, HBO, are Mormons being “everywhere?” And if I'm not mistaken, I don't think the church was exactly thrilled to put it mildly about either of these productions.

Sorry, but I don't think either is going to have a thing to do with the average voter, or anyone else for that matter, potentially being more comfortable with Romney's religion. As the other guests on there did point out a little later in the discussion, the hatred of President Obama is the one thing that will allow the Evangelical voters out there to get over Romney's religion and vote for him in the general election after snubbing him during the primary races. It's not going to be because of what those “elitists” in New York or Hollywood are doing and because they've made a play and a cable series making fun of the Mormon Church.

I haven't seen the play, but I watched Big Love on HBO and it sure didn't make me feel any more comfortable about the Mormon Church and their history of polygamy. I'm sure Romney doesn't want to remind anyone of that since it's not that far back in his own family's history where polygamy was practiced as well.

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This has to be one of the more pitiful displays that I've witnessed in a while. Andrew Sullivan was on Chris Matthews' weekend show doing his best to give cover to the Republican establishment. While Sullivan has been famously sneering at those who criticize Obama, he has no problem with the race to the bottom on wages and competing with slave labor overseas. There's no other reason for him to defend both Mitt Romney and Steve Jobs and how both men managed to make themselves some of the wealthiest men in America.

There are absolutely lessons to be learned about how to fix the income disparity in the United States and what solutions we should be moving towards. But voices like Sullivan's--who glorify the state of being wealthy for an elite few to the disadvantage of most--are the last ones to whom we should be listening to if this interview is any indication. Sullivan's basic message here is that we're going to be competing with slave wages overseas and if that upsets you, well, there's nothing that can be done about it, as though our Congress and President Obama don't have any control over our trade laws, or how imports are taxed and whether we're on a level playing field with our competitors overseas.

Sadly, Sullivan's embrace of globalization and our inability to do anything about it wasn't necessarily the worst part of this interview here. He also lambasted President Obama for not doing more to promote the failed Simpson-Bowles Committee, pretending that anything that came out of that debacle ever passed Congress to sit unsigned on Obama's desk.

Here's more on the interview with host Chris Matthews leading it off this way.

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While discussing Rush Limbaugh's defense of the NASCAR crowd that booed First Lady Michele Obama and the Vice President Joe Biden's wife Jill and Rush Limbaugh's subsequent defense of those fans and calling FLOTUS Michele Obama “uppity”, which host Chris Matthews rightfully called not “just a dog whistle, but a bugle call”, Matthews asked whether President Obama is going to have a hard time garnering the white vote this election as he did during his first campaign for president.

Andrew Sullivan, for all of his faults and with being in the same class as the David Brooks and Tom Friedman's of the world out there and with being wrong in his support of the Republican Party for years and making excuses for their policies, even though they obviously had utter and complete disdain for gay men such as himself, gets this one right.

As Sullivan rightfully asked here, just how many more minority groups does the GOP have to alienate and piss off before they have a real problem where they cannot just be the party of white angry men any more.

SULLIVAN: But I think it's a huge problem for the Republicans too.

MATTHEWS: How so?

SULLIVAN: Look, you've been watching these debates. Everybody, a lot more have been watching them. If you're a Latino, if you're black, if you're a woman and watched the way they sort of coo-cooed sexual harassment allegations. If you're gay and they booed a gay soldier. I mean how many minorities are they going to tell not to vote Republican until they realize this is going to be a problem for them?

And the more the Limbaugh brand adheres to the Republican Party, the more doomed they are.

As all of them noted, Romney has moved so far to the right on immigration, he's going to have to eventually move on that, but we're not likely to see him flip-flop again until the general election. How much longer the Republicans can continue to follow the Limbaugh model and use racial divisions to win elections successfully remains a question we haven't answered yet, but I sincerely hope those divisions continue to go by the wayside as Rush Limbaugh and Fox's audiences continue to age.

It's long past time that it's not socially acceptable for some racist like Limbaugh to be openly calling the First Lady "uppity" and all I can say is I have to wonder how someone like Limbaugh can continue to look himself in the mirror and spout hatred such as he did here, but I guess those millions he's got coming in somehow make that reflection of such ugliness a whole lot easier to ignore.

I hope Sullivan is right that there's finally a backlash against such hatred and ugliness and that those who are engaging in actual class warfare are punished at the ballot box.

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As Driftglass pointed out in his weekly Sunday morning post with his take on the weekend talk shows, or the 'Mouse Circus" as he describes them, this segment on Meet the Press discussing former Vice President Dick Cheney's soon to be released memoir is yet another demonstration of everything that's wrong with our corporate media.

Here's more from Driftglass:

Two, correctional-facility-based questions bookended the Mouse Circus today: one asked and one unasked.

• Asked: Why the Hell weren't prisoners being held on Riker's Island evacuated?
• Unasked: Why the Hell isn't Richard Bruce Cheney and most of the rest of his Republican politico-criminal enterprise rotting away the rest of their lives in federal prison?

Interred beneath the vast, complicit media silence between the implications of these two questions is where you will find most everything that is wrong with the United States in this Year of Our Lord 2011.

Which is why, rather that daring to look Evil in the eye and asking "Why?", everyone instead settled into their comfortable media roles, giggled and whispering uncomfortably about how little regard cyborg and unindicted-war-criminal Cheney had for anyone that stood in his way, and how really, really unapologetic Vice President Sociopath is for anything.

As if this were some kind of surprise.

More at his blog with the rest of his critique of this Sunday's Mouse Circus and warning for anyone not familiar with his site, some of it's not safe for work.

Transcript via NBC below the fold:

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Oh the good old days of Republicans stealing presidential elections. Norah O'Donnell filling in for Chris Matthews and the panel of Dan Rather, Katy Kay, Kelly O'Donnell and Richard Stengel yuck it up over the ten year old coverage of the Florida recount debacle and Saturday Night Live's parody of Chris Matthews interviewing Katherine Harris.

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This had to be one of the more irritating segments I've had the unfortunate circumstance of watching on Morning Joe in a while. First they went about trashing the students protesting tuition fee hikes in London and those silly Socialists in Europe who are all just used to sucking off of the government teet. Then they proceeded to trashing anyone who's dared to speak out against the early report released by the president's Catfood Commission co-chairs Bowles and Simpson.

How dare those reactionaries Nancy Pelosi, Paul Krugman and Richard Trumka speak out against those good reasonable adults who want to raise the retirement age and balance the budget off of the backs of the elderly, the middle class and the poor. The nerve of them!

Update: And just one last word on this panel discussion as an afterthought. Did anyone else feel like they were watching a bunch of high school kids debate policy when it came to their reaction on the protests in London? Yeah Mika, destroying the social safety net and the government's former position that education matters beyond high school if you want to retain a middle class and those students being angry that the government has decided that doesn't matter any more and protesting is just like your brother pulling a stunt where he imitated a cop and got in trouble for it. That's exactly the same thing and just kids being kids who need to be disciplined for their bad behavior. Jebus these people make my head hurt.

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The panel on The Chris Matthews Show this weekend did their best to try to soften how disgusted most of us should be after watching George W. Bush’s upcoming interview which will be aired on NBC this Monday with Matt Lauer.

LAUER: “I can never forget what happened to America that day. I would pour my heart and soul into protecting this country, whatever it took.”

BUSH: Yeah.

LAUER: It took thousands of lives, American lives, billions of dollars; you could say it took Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib…

BUSH: Yeah.

LAUER: And government eavesdropping and waterboarding. Did it take too much?

BUSH: We didn’t have an attack. 3000 people died on September the 11th and I vowed that I would do my duty to protect the American people and uhm…they didn’t get hit again.

Chris Matthews went on to ask how Obama would have handled the aftermath of 9-11 and if he’d have reacted differently than Bush, like he doesn’t know that answer all ready. Bob Woodward pointed out that al Qaeda was not present in Iraq until after we invaded them.

The part of this discussion that really got under my skin was this statement by Katy Kay.

KAY: The sort of political extraordinariness of the Bush administration was that Cheney managed to convince 70% of American people that Iraq was, that Saddam Hussein was directly behind Iraq. (I think she meant to say 9-11 here.)

So in other words, it was Dick Cheney’s fault that he was allowed to lie to the public and not the media for failing to alert the public to the fact that he was lying. Okay Katy. Nothing like relinquishing on your responsibilities if you want to call yourself “journalists.”

Mrs. Greenspan followed that by doing her best to carry a little water for the Bush administration by pretending that they really were concerned about a threat from Iraq until Chris Matthews pointed out that the CIA didn’t agree with them.

Bob Woodward went on to trivialize any of Colin Powell’s objections to the wisdom of our invasion even though we all know he went on to give that speech to the UN where he carried water for Bush with fear mongering over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

The panel spent most of the rest of the segment talking about whether George W. Bush and his father disagreed or not over his decision to invade Iraq, like that means a damn thing now when it comes to all of the lives and money wasted there.

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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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There's nothing that aggravates me more than listening to a bunch of overpaid, over privileged bunch of Washington insiders that are never going to have to worry about how they'll manage their finances past retirement age because they're members of the DC Villager club, telling the rest of us how we'd better just "get used" to the fact that these people would rather keep their tax breaks for the rich and have endless military occupations than to make good on the social contract made when they set up a system to assure that the poorest among us didn't fall into abject poverty during their senior years and that there is a social safety net for the most vulnerable among us. Mika Brzezinski did not say in those exact terms that we should "gut" Social Security but I don't have any doubt that is exactly what she was talking about.

I don't know what the salaries are for any of these people and if anyone who contributes to this blog that has more time than I do to find out would want to share that information, it would be appreciated, but if I had to guess, and I'd say it's a pretty safe to say all of them are making enough money that they don't have to worry whether Social Security is there or not for them to retire comfortably.

But Miss Mika is going to tell the rest of us that we'd better just get used to having that money taken from what is, as Susie noted, a pay-as-you-go program which funds itself and just isn't going to be there for you crybabies that think you ought to get something back from that money you paid into the system.

These people disgust me so badly there are no words. It's let them eat cake at its worst, and I really hope the public doesn't stand for it any more than they did when Bush was trying to sell us this nonsense.

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Good little CNBC anchor Trish Regan apparently really doesn't want her and her investment banker husband's taxes to go up since she thinks it's "un-American" for them to have to pay a higher rate than those with lower incomes. Isn't that special? I've got to say Joe Klein actually did a pretty good job here of knocking down Regan's arguments and her great concern for the rich when the Bush tax cuts go away.

Matthews: Trish, you’re with CNBC who covers business, but there you have a politician in the President of the United States with that term “drunken sailors spending” looping his head. This is a problem. How does he talk about getting the country moving again with a stimulus program, spending money when he’s buying this argument that spending is bad?

Regan: Well first of all he’s trying to blame President Bush for this and that’s why he’s saying you know the Republicans were the ones who did all this spending. But it’s his administration that came forward with this an $800 stimulus package, and Americans are now sitting back and saying, okay where did that money go? Why is it that we’re still looking at an unemployment rate that is in the 10%. They’re angry. They’re frustrated. They want to get back to work and it’s clear that the spending didn’t work. So he’s facing a real challenge.

Matthews: How does he sell more that he hasn’t been able to do? How does he sell more spending since the spending has gotten such a bad rap for not creating more jobs?

Regan: He can’t sell more spending right now. Perhaps the only way he could go and I don’t think he would do it if to offer tax cuts say to American businesses. It would be permanent tax cuts for the creation of jobs.

Matthews: I want to go to you Joe because the big argument the President…

Klein: Who said spending didn’t work? Who says the spending didn’t work?

Regan: No. I said 9.7% in unemployment. It didn’t work. People are out of work.

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