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Who needs Fox when we've got Villager extraordinaire and MSNBC host Mrs. Greenspan, a.k.a. Andrea Mitchell doing their dirty work for them on this Sunday's Meet the Press?

I guess she got the recent memo with the latest GOP talking points on the scandal mongering we've been seeing for months on end, because that's exactly what she was reading from here as part of the panel discussing these NSA leaks.

ANDREA MITCHELL: General, one of the things that I think has been written about from both the left and the right, Peggy Noonan wrote about it this weekend, is that there is a lack of confidence in the government, which has evolved a variety of administrations.

So when you say, "Trust me, this data, the metadata are stored and we're not going to go into it unless there's a court order, unless it's because of a terrorist plot, and then if a judge orders that, it's then turned over to the F.B.I. and then they can pursue and look at the context, so we've got the numbers, but we're not looking, we're not reading."

But people no longer, after Benghazi, after I.R.S. certainly, and after a lot of other things, don't have confidence in their government. And that is leading to a disaffection and a disconnection, that going forward is very troubling.

You know what's actually "very troubling" Mrs. Greenspan? When people who call themselves reporters continue to prop up fake "scandals" and conflate them with real ones, so that the people who watch their shows remain so confused they don't know what to think. That and scandal mongering while ignoring the fact that these people who are supposed to be representing the voters in the Congress are refusing anything about the massive income disparity in the United States or doing anything to try to get Americans back to work.

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Someone needs to ask Sen. Chuck Schumer to watch a few of Lawrence O'Donnell's recent segments on this so-called IRS "scandal" regarding the tax exempt status of these "social welfare" groups that are really just political organizations that want to hide their donor list.

Had Schumer been watching O'Donnell's show, he'd already know that the law on the books says that 501(c)(4) groups are supposed to be operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare. We don't need a new law allowing them to have 10 percent of their activities involved in politicking as Schumer suggested on this Sunday's Meet the Press. We need to ask the IRS to start following the law as it is written already.

GREGORY: You lobbied the IRS to look into these groups. You didn't specify conservative groups, but there are those on the right who say that you and others effectively did, that you were really targeting conservative groups not to be given that tax exempt status.

SCHUMER: No, that's absolutely not true. First our letter came a year and a half after they started targeting the tea party, so it couldn't have caused it. That's for sure. But second, look at what our letter said. It says form a bright line and determine how much political activity a so-called social welfare organization can do before they lose their tax exempt status.

Our letter is actually the solution. I would propose that we say, we pass legislation that more than 10 percent, if more than 10 percent of your activity is political activity, you lose your tax exemption. And if you had a bright line, it wouldn't be up to some bureaucrat to make their own determination, perhaps wrongly based on political leans. It would be the same standard for all groups, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican.

That's what we need and our letter is actually the solution to the problem.

As we already discussed here, Donald Rumsfeld found himself getting a nice softball interview from NBC's David Gregory this weekend on Meet the Press, but not all of his book tour has gone quite as smoothly as the big wet kiss he got from Gregory this Sunday.

Majority FM's Sam Seder walked his listeners though some of the highlights of Rumsfeld's contentious interview with American Public Media's Kai Ryssdal, who, as the KOS diary I linked in the prior post on the subject noted, asked "Rumsfeld some of the questions we've all wanted to ask."

As Seder noted, Rumsfeld might be looking to find himself a new publicist after that one, since he certainly didn't expect anyone to actually hold him accountable for his actions during the Bush administration and our invasion of Iraq. Seder says he hopes that it's not the last time he's subjected to an interview like this one because the government sure isn't going to hold him accountable, but I wouldn't hold my breath on whether he'll let it happen ever again.

Sadly, we're not going to see the corporate media hold him accountable either. We're going to see more interviews like the shameful one we got from David Gregory or we won't see him on the air at all.

One final note on the video above: Seder incorrectly identified Kai Ryssdal as working for NPR. He works for APM.

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So just how overblown does your scandal mongering and false equivalencies have to get before they're even too much for NBC's David Gregory to stomach without some push back? Peggy Noonan found out this Sunday on Meet the Press, after writing an op-ed this week which called these trumped up "scandals" the media has been fixating on "the worst Washington scandal since Watergate."

As Gregory pointed out to Noonan, the administration she worked for well after the Watergate scandal had that pesky little problem called Iran-Contra that she somehow forgot to mention in her article. Of course, reminding her about St. Ronnie's problems didn't seem to faze her one bit:

GREGORY: Peggy Noonan, you wrote something this week that really struck me in your column on Friday. And I want to put it up on the screen and ask you about it. “We are in the midst,” you write, “Of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. [The IRS and AP scandals] have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.”

I have to say, Peggy, what you don’t talk about here is an administration for a man that you worked for who led the Iran-Catra-- Contra scandal where they ran a secret war and lied to Congress and all the rest. Over-- overstatement here?

PEGGY NOONAN: I don’t think so. I think this is-- what is going on now is all three of these scandals makes a cluster that implies some very bad things about the forthcomingness of the administration and about its ability to at certain dramatic points do the right thing. And I got to tell you, the-- you-- everyone can argue about which of these things is most upsetting, but this IRS thing is something I’ve never seen in my lifetime. It is the revenue gathering arm of the U.S. government…

GREGORY: Peggy-- Peggy, wait a second.

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Yes, who better to ask about "government accountability" than war criminal Donald Rumsfeld? It seems the producers of Meet the Press and host David Gregory are doing their best to become a parody of Fox "News" - because that's certainly what they gave us this Sunday by allowing Rumsfeld on there for this softball interview.

We didn't get any questions about the invasion of Iraq, or torture, or whether Rumsfeld has any remorse about his actions during the Bush administration, but we were treated to him being asked about sexual assaults in the military, the IRS, Benghazi and of course he got plenty of time to hawk his new book.

Note to David Gregory: Here's how an interview with Donald Rumsfeld should be conducted if you want to call yourself a "journalist." -- Kai Ryssdal asks Rumsfeld some of the questions we've all wanted to ask.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript if you don't have the stomach for watching the clip.

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Arizona Sen. John McCain (R) on Sunday warned that current U.S. foreign policy could have negative consequences for years because the Syrian people would "take revenge" if the United States decided not to take military action to oust President Bashar Hafez al-Assad.

During an interview on NBC's Meet the Press, McCain suggested that the U.S. should respond to reports that the Assad regime used chemical weapons by creating a "safe zone" with aerial attacks and arming rebel forces.

"Be prepared with an international force to secure these stocks of chemical and perhaps biological weapons," the Arizona Republican advised. "There are a number of caches of these chemical weapons, they cannot fall into the hands of the jihadists, otherwise we will end up seeing those weapons used in other places in the Middle East. It's a very dangerous situation."

McCain added that both he and the American people did not want to see "boots on the ground," but he did want to give the rebels the assistance needed to shift the balance of power.

"We have to as an international group, plan and be ready operationally -- not just plan, but be ready operationally -- to go in and secure those areas," he explained. "But the worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria because it would turn the people against us."

"And just let me say, the Syrian people are angry and bitter at the United States. I was in a refugee camp in Jordan, and there are thousands of people and kids. And this woman who's a school teacher said, 'Sen. McCain, you see these people here? They're going to take revenge on those people who refuse to help them.' They're angry and bitter. And that legacy could last for a long time too unless we assist them."

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On this Sunday's Meet the Press, Sen. John McCain continued to prove the point Chris Hayes made on his show this Friday about just who Congress is responsive to, and it's not your average citizen out there. McCain thinks we have "our priorities a little bit skewed" on these sequestration cuts, but of course there's only one area he's concerned about, and that's defense spending.

MCCAIN: Well I say with all due respect to my friends, it's a little bit hypocritical, the same day when all the focus was on the delays that we have in getting through airports, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army was saying that we're... if we don't reverse this, we're going to have a hollow army. We'll be unable to defend the nation and it would take us ten or fifteen years to recover.

I think we have our priorities a little bit skewed here. Look, I'm for giving the FAA flexibility, but I also want to give the military flexibility and I don't want these sequestration cuts to be as deep as they are on the issue of defense. We've got a lot of savings we can make in national security, but right now we are, in the words of the Secretary of Defense and our uniformed service chiefs, we're putting the security of this nation at risk.

McCain was basically repeating what he said in a press release from this Friday.

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Here's something you don't see happen every day. Peggy Noonan actually got called out for attempting to repeat one of her favorite talking points -- that President Obama could somehow wave a magic wand and force the members of Congress to behave the way he wants them to -- and on Meet the Press of all places.

GREGORY: And-- and yet this week as-- as this was going on, as the investigation was going on, the Senate defeats a background check bill for-- for guns. So we-- we are confronting this violence but still very divided about how we react to it and try to solve it.

NOONAN: Yeah, I think the essential problem is that Americans at this point don’t trust their government so much to do the right thing. They are skeptical of all bills on things that they care about to-- to lower the conversation a little bit, get it down to-- to mere politics, I guess. I think there is a problem when you’ve got 90 percent of the American people wanting something like background checks and a president who is just re-elected and riding a wave, can’t make anything move that way. I think there is a problem there, and I think he is having, as somebody said, a problem with the levers of power.

KEARNS GOODWIN: But maybe the problem is also the structure of the Senate. You know, at the turn of the 20th century when public sentiment wanted a lot of things done to deal with industrialization and the problem of the slums, the Senate was impossible to move because it was millionaires in there. They finally realized they have to have direct election of senators. They used to be elected by the state legislatures and they’re only susceptible to special interest. Maybe that’s the trouble now, that structural Senate given the 60 votes that are needed, given who they listen to, given the power of special interest, public sentiment cannot penetrate. And we’ve seen it now for the last decade. That’s what the dysfunction is about. It’s not just the Senate, it’s the Congress.

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It seems we've got at least one Republican who is not on board with Sen. Lindsey Graham and crew and their talking points on whether the FBI did their job in investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the Boston Marathon bombing and on whether his brother ought to be treated as an enemy combatant.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that when Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect killed Friday in a shootout with police, travelled to Russia in 2012, he may have done so under an alias.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s six-month stay in Russia last year “becomes extremely important” as a key to the investigation of the Boston bombings, Rogers told NBC’s David Gregory. His visit to Russia “would lead one to believe that that’s probably where he got that final radicalization to push him to commit acts of violence and where he may have received training” in terrorist techniques. Rogers, a former FBI agent, said the FBI had questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev after being given information from a foreign intelligence service “that they were concerned about his possible radicalization.” [...]

The FBI, Rogers said, “did their due diligence and did a very thorough job” of investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but when the FBI asked for more help from that foreign intelligence service, it got no further cooperation. [...]

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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) corrected NBC host David Gregory on Sunday after he repeated the National Rifle Association's (NRA) talking points in opposition to expanding gun background checks even though only 10 percent of the country agrees with the lobbying group.

During a panel discussion on NBC's Meet the Press, Gregory argued that "not a lot is about to be accomplished" even if the Senate succeeds in passing a bill to close the so-called gun show loophole and expand background checks to Internet sales.

"I disagree," Gillibrand insisted. "I think we have a very good start on beginning to crack down on gun crime. And the bottom line is the families of Newtown, the families all across America who lose children every single day, they deserve a vote, they deserve an answer, they deserve leadership out of Washington."

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) argued that the background check proposal "would serve primarily to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens, while doing little of anything to prevent tragedies like [Newtown] from occurring in the future."

Gregory asked Gillibrand if supporting gun control would be "tough" to do after she had touted a pro-NRA voting record during the 2008 election.

"That's why I know this bill will work," the New York Democrat explained. "It is making sure you protect Second Amendment rights. We're not undermining Second Amendment rights by saying criminals have to go through a background check before they can buy that weapon or straw purchasers and trafficker can't be stemming their guns straight into these communities."

"But the NRA doesn't believe that," Gregory interrupted. "The NRA does not agree."

"This is not about the NRA!" Gillibrand exclaimed. "This is about families! This is about America! Seventy-percent of NRA members like the background check bill, like the straw purchase bill. They even support things like assault weapons ban."

"So if you're talking about people and if you're talking about America and what Americans want, Americans want these reforms. We just saw that mother who lost her child, you cannot do nothing in the face of that tragedy!"