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Our corporate media has been trotting these Bushies back out for years on end now, so it's no surprise that we'd eventually see Alberto Gonzales take his turn. I guess the producers of Morning Joe thought there was no one better for their audience to hear from when it comes to Department of Justice scandals than Gonzo.

It does seem his memory has improved slightly since 2007, when he couldn't recall much of anything when testifying before Congress.

Steve Benen summed up his appearance this Wednesday quite nicely. After first explaining why it's likely Gonzales has kept such a low profile since leaving office and the fact that he went through quite a bit of trouble finding a job, he reminded us why he has absolutely no credibility to be commenting on the DOJ and journalists: Alberto Gonzales returns from obscurity:

The former A.G. nevertheless appeared on MSNBC this morning, apparently ready to address some of ongoing controversies. He seemed inclined to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt when it came to subpoenaing Associated Press phone logs, but this nevertheless stood out for me.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recalled on Wednesday a time when he was confronted with a "very serious leak investigation" similar to the one that has embroiled the Obama administration this week. But, he said, he went a very different route and decided against subpoenaing a reporter's notes.

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Nothing like watching a bunch of overpaid, millionaire pundits yucking it up and having a grand old time discussing whether the administration has happily thrown their base under the bus with -- no regard for the lives of those who would be affected by these policy changes.

That's exactly what the audience was treated to on this Friday's Morning Joe on MSNBC. These millionaire pundits probably would not find the hippie punching so humorous if any of of them thought they might have to rely on Social Security to get by in their old age.

Carville: I Think Obama Likes Angering Liberals (VIDEO):

Democratic strategist James Carville said Friday that he doesn't think President Barack Obama is sweating the criticisim he's taken from his liberal base over a budget proposal that includes cuts to Social Security.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Carville said he thinks Obama relishes the commendation he's received from deficit hawks like New York Times columnist David Brooks and host Joe Scarborough. Asked by co-host Mike Barnicle how the President will respond to the outrage from the left-wing of the Democratic Party, Carville was blunt.

"I think he likes that," Carville said. "I don't think he's upset. He got a very favorable Washington Post editorial. 'Morning Joe,' very favorable commentary right here. I guarantee you if he's up watching this right now. Got a good David Brooks column. He's kind of excited this morning. This is kind of important to him."

But Carville added that the White House is not "totally out of bounds" with its budget, arguing that the proposal will "throw the Republicans off" and that Obama is desperate to strike a grand bargain with the GOP.

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After again endorsing his sister in the upcoming House race in South Carolina and after her opponent, former Gov. Mark Sanford's appearance on Morning Joe this Wednesday, where he was given a big wet kiss by the crew of the show and Scarborough announcing that it was "going to be, Morning Joe vs The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert was more than happy to respond.

COLBERT: Oh... oh... it is on! Morning Joe vs The Colbert Report. Did I want this fight? No. [...]

Of course in some ways, it's always been Morning Joe vs The Colbert Report, though technically at that time of the morning, my network runs a P90X commercial. Yes. It's all about the muscle confusion. Where as Joe's show is just about confusion, in that sometimes people confuse it with news.

But not this morning folks. Because this morning was just pure infomercial for his old buddy, Mark Sanford.

After showing footage of the lot of them sucking up to Sanford, the worst of it being Mike Barnicle, who actually told Sanford that "he was struck" by Sanford's "honesty" over his affair, after he got busted "hiking the Appalachian Trail" with his mistress and if "there was any fear of that honesty coming back and playing a perilous role" in his political future, Colbert responded.

COLBERT: Oh, that's some in depth reporting. You know, Woodward and Bernstein may have had Deep Throat, but Mike Barnicle is doing something similar to Mark Sanford. I just hope... I just hope Mike can breathe through his nose. Because he's right. He's right. When Sanford finally surfaced, the first thing that everybody thought was "Man, that guy is being so honest about how much he lied." And I'm sure he would have been just as honest if no one had caught him.

Well, it's my turn Joe Joe. I'm going to shock some people right now, and endorse my sister, Elizabeth Colbert Busch for Congress. Yes... yes... yes... she's a Democrat, but she's a businesswoman, a job creator, who when raising three children on $14,000 a year went back to school, built a twenty year career in international trade and is now leading Mark Sanford in two consecutive polls.

Are we ready to do this nation! Yeah! Yeah!

And I tell ya. I'll tell ya. Mark Sanford should thank you Joe Scarborough, because I would not have done that, if you had not inspired me.

I look forward to seeing if the crew on Morning Joe actually acknowledges this segment and responds to it, or if they choose to try to pretend it didn't happen, or worse yet, if they respond and selectively edit Colbert's remarks and spare both Scarborough and Barnicle from the worst of his criticism. We'll find out shortly.

On this tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, both Joe Scarborough and Luke Russert attempted to do a bit of revisionist history this Tuesday morning on MSNBC and Salon's Alex Pareene did a fine job of taking them apart for it.

MSNBC selectively remembers the Iraq War:

Updated: Morning Joe and Luke Russert leave out some important context. Like how much MSNBC pushed for war

MSNBC today ran two very interesting segments addressing the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. In one, Luke Russert interviewed veteran NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel on the state of Iraq today (spoiler: not great). In another, Joe Scarborough hosted a large panel to discus how the Iraq War happened and what went wrong.

The Russert segment is sort of bizarre, referring to “that big anniversary” and completely ignoring the reasons the Iraq War started. It concludes — after Engel explains how Iraq is once again in a sectarian civil war — with Russert essentially asserting the inevitability of a military strike against Iran, saying they could be “months” away from building nuclear weapons. [...]

Both of these segments show how incredibly little anyone learned from very recent history. [...]

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During a discussion about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his latest effort to try to "fix" the GOP and his so-called "minority outreach initiative," which, as we already discussed here, looks like it's headed to be a massive flop, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough decided he'd give old Reince a hand with that minority outreach program by badgering guest Eugene Robinson and demanding he name "the top three issues that make that sort of outreach difficult for Republicans."

Note to Joe Scarborough -- if you want to help out with reaching out to African-Americans, here's a few things you could do. One, don't do it while badgering one of your African-American guests to rattle off a list while you brow beat them and presume that they would want to speak for every other African-American in the country. And don't pretend you don't know full well what the real answers to your questions are already.

Here's a hint on why the Republicans lost the majority of the African-American vote: The New Deal and the Civil Rights Act. And then we there's the Southern Strategy and demonizing and fearmongering to win elections. And to this day you can throw in voter disenfranchisement, these White Supremacist groups and militias cropping up everywhere, the birther movement, the overt racism we saw come from these TeaBirchers and the fact that the Republican party looks like they've completely lost their minds since the election of the first black president.

I'll leave it at that but the list is miles long when it comes to what Republicans have done to slowly disenfranchise the majority of the electorate other than old white men. Good luck with that outreach program Reince. You're going to need it.

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The Krugman-bashing on Morning Joe continued unabated Wednesday, following Joe Scarborough and Paul Krugman's debate the other night on Charlie Rose's show. It seems the right has been looking for countries to prop up to prove that their calls for more austerity measures in the United States are not going to harm the economy and they've found at least one in the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia.

Scarborough started things off in the clip above by writing off our current economic circumstances as just another "period of deleveraging" where the United States needs to get its fiscal house in order with absolutely no reference to the fact that we should not be taking a series of booms and busts as the norm, or the part that deregulation and the dismantling all of the protections that were put in place following the Great Depression to attempt to prevent these types of cycles from happening again have played.

After Scarborough pointed out the fact that Americans and particularly young people are not longer racking up debt, but are also not spending and pumping money into the economy, his guest and CNBC regular Miles Nadal then moved onto the Krugman bashing:

NADAL: So when you say, are you positive on the economy, I'm positive in a cautious kind of way, but as Joe articulated on The Charlie Rose Show, which I thought was really a terrific debate, there are things on the horizon that are very scary. And I thought Paul Krugman's perspective was kind of, a little frightening in the sense that he didn't see any possibility of any Black Swan on anything that's happening and if you talk to any informed business person, that's not possible that you could completely eliminate the probability that nothing, including this multi-trillion dollar deficit would have no impact.

And as we articulated in the green room, nobody could run a company or a home the way the government is running things.

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I guess PBS decided that "Fix the Debt" campaign's Steve Rattner wasn't getting quite enough air time, what with his near daily appearances on MSNBC's Morning Joe, because Charlie Rose and his producers gave him some unfettered air time Monday evening.

Rose asks why President Obama should care about the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" thinks about his policies, and whether he's willing to go after our social safety nets. I'd love to know the last time Rose asked whether a Republican president should just ignore the base of his party and suggested that what they think doesn't matter all that much. To his credit, Rattner did admit that President Obama has good reason to pay attention to those that just reelected him, and that they should not be ignored.

He also briefly alluded to the conversation he had during the panel segment on This Week, where his fellow guest Steve Brill rightfully pointed out that lowering the Medicare age would actually save money, but rather than getting into the weeds on that discussion, Rattner only admitted that maybe raising the age might not be "such a good idea." Heaven forbid anyone might actually discuss the heart of Brill's arguments, because it runs counter to the Villager narrative that we must raise the Medicare eligibility age in order to control our health care costs.

Instead, the conversation turned to whether President Obama is entitled to change his mind on the issue or not and with Rattner again pushing for "significant changes to entitlements" as long as there "was a reasonable response from the Republicans on revenues." The idea that Republicans are ever going to come around on taxes seems pretty ridiculous, and as Karoli noted here on our health care costs, the problem is not with the cost to administer Medicare or with the consumers out there, it's with the providers Congress refuses to reign in.

Rose and Rattner were also extremely dismissive of Paul Krugman, who has written extensively about the fact that the debt and the deficit are not urgent issues now and not what we should be focusing on, with Rose calling him "a Nobel Prize winner, but also a minority opinion."

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Conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough took the "both sides do it" argument to the limit on Thursday when he declared that Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was "as extreme" as National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre.

During his Morning Joe broadcast, Scarborough blasted LaPierre's recent "Stand and Fight" op-ed responding to President Barack Obama's call for gun control during the State of the Union address for being "laced with racial overtones."

"After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia," LaPierre wrote. "Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn."

"Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals. These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that," he continued. "We, the American people, clearly see the daunting forces we will undoubtedly face: terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster."

Scarborough, however, argued that LaPierre had essentially undercut "everything Republicans are now trying to do to make up for their 27 percent in the election with Hispanics."

"A racially tinged, very suggestive op-ed by Wayne LaPierre, who Republicans are blindly following around," the MSNBC host added. "The extremism of Wayne LaPiere is so frightening."

At some point during the course of the show, Scarborough decided to provoke Twitter by comparing LaPierre to Krugman.

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When your petulance, mugging for the cameras and obstruction get so bad that it's even too much for bully Joe Scarborough, you've got problems. Morning Joe Crew Rips Republicans For Hagel Obstruction: ‘It’s A Colossal Mistake’:

Republican Joe Scarborough is tired of his party’s mistreatment of Defense Secretary-nominee Chuck Hagel and its continuing, all-consuming focus on Benghazi.

The focus of Scarborough’s ire this morning on his MSNBC show Morning Joe was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s announcement on Sunday that he will place a hold not only on Hagel, but also on CIA Director-nominee John Brennan -- until he gets further action from the White House on Benghazi.

Scarborough lashed out at Graham and his neoconservative cohorts, unable to believe how misguided their attacks on the Obama administration have been:

SCARBOROUGH: If you’ve got a working class guy who has voted Republican every four years and he turns on the Sunday shows and he’s flipping around the channels and he sees Republicans in February still talking about Benghazi, saying they’re going to hold up the picks for secretary of defense and CIA director for something that happened back in the fall, and they are continuing on this…to hold up this and talk about it on Sunday morning, it’s a colossal mistake.

[...] Graham has been seeking out “the truth” on the attack in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead for months now, despite an ample amount of facts already having been uncovered. A Cabinet nominee has never been filibustered by the Senate, leaving Graham’s threat in a position to make history.

Regular Mike Barnicle wasn't much kinder. After Scarborough said the other members of the Senate basically need to tell Graham to get off of the television, he followed with this:

BARNICLE: Reading the transcripts is pretty disturbing, what Sen. Graham had to say yesterday. He basically said --and I'm paraphrasing here --if the President of the United States had picked up the phone and called someone in Libya, he could have saved the lives of the Americans.

Clearly, evidence means nothing to him. Clearly the timeline of events means nothing to him and someone should give Sen. Graham a Snickers bar and tell him to go sit in the corner until he's happy about something. It's disturbing.

I said before Graham's not going to stop as long as there's no punishment in the media for his behavior. Perhaps this is a start on seeing that happen, but until media outlets quit putting this arrogant, irrational twit on the air, he's going to keep it up.

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Lowell Field at Blue Virginia caught this interesting tidbit from Joe Scarborough this morning. It looks increasingly like we'll continue to see GOP battles between the extremist Tea Party and their followers and the pragmatists like Scarborough who want electoral wins.

Ken Cucchinelli is running against Democrat Terry McAuliffe for Governor of Virginia.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Cuccinelli, right, so here's a guy - Tea Party favorite in Virginia - the guy is certifiable when it comes to mainstream political thought. This is a guy who attacks Medicare, he attacks Medicaid, he attacks Social Security, this is a guy who said he was thinking about not having his children get Social Security numbers because, quote, "that's how they track you." This is a guy that has said more things that will offend the voters that swing elections than is humanly possible.

Here's what Blue Virginia had to say on the matter:

Thank you, Republican Joe Scarborough, for echoing what Democrats, progressives, liberals, environmentalists, etc. have been saying for years: Ken Kookinelli is straightjacket/men-in-white-coats-level loony tunes. The scary thing is, Scarborough's list was a short one for Cuckoo: add to it climate science denial, which in and of itself puts you into the tinfoil hat camp of flat earthers and "the moonshot was faked" folks; dabbling in "birtherism;" vicious anti-LGBT attitudes; support for a "personhood" amendment, which would make abortion providers murderers and also make several popular forms of contraception (as well as embryonic stem cell research) akin to murder as well. There's a lot more than that, too, but we'll just leave it there for now. The fact that the Republican Party could nominate a total nutjob like this, and that it's not an isolated incident - see Todd Akin, Christine O'Donnell, Richard Mourdoch, and many others the past few years - really says it all about that party. Why would anyone in their right mind vote Republican at this point is truly beyond me.