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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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I didn't think it was possible, but the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan contradicted herself in such an obvious, head-spinning manner on this Sunday's Meet the Press, that it was even too much for guest host Chuck Todd to stomach.

Here's what she said about gun control and why it didn't get through the Congress:

PEGGY NOONAN: I think a big part of this story is that people don't trust Congress. After Newtown, there was a great bubbling feeling of, "My goodness, there must be at least some things we can do legislatively to make this whole gun situation better." If the Congress, if the Senate had moved quickly on discrete, small bills, having to do with background checks, I mean quickly, in the weeks after Newtown--

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From this Sunday's Meet the Press:-- shorter Peggy Noonan -- You'll take the GOP's wedge issues away when you pry them from their cold, dead hands.

TODD: You know, Peggy, what's been interesting about this week is all of the big polarizing issues of the last two generations, culturally, all popped up in one week and one of it had to do with the Supreme Court and gay marriage, with abortion, this culture wars, normally when it comes back, it's something that's helpful to Republicans. Is it good this time for the conservative movement to have these issues out there?

NOONAN: I don't know. I think all of these cultural issues, as I guess we call them, have been major issues in America for almost half a century, really. The abortion argument was going on fifty years ago. Roe came forty years ago. It is hard to resolve these issues because they're not just cultural issues. They are moral issues and Americans feel differently about them. So I think one way or another, they'll probably be bubbling out there for a long time and it's not the worst thing.

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Republican strategist Karl Rove engaged in some friendly -- if not tone deaf -- banter with Democratic strategist Donna Brazile on Sunday, joking that she owed him some "fried chicken."

During a panel discussion on ABC, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan noted that many conflicts within the Republican Party would be healed after a strong presidential candidate emerged.

"That was Bill Clinton after Walter Mondale lost, after Jimmy Carter lost," Brazile pointed out. "We had a dynamic governor who was reform minded, who took those reform issues and brought them into the national forefront. He really helped recharge the Democratic Party."

"But you know, the Republican Party is out to lunch," she added, turning to Rove. "I watched CPAC, Charles -- I mean, Karl... Charles was former friend."

"I thought I was a current friend," Rove laughed.

"You're always a friend," Brazile replied. "But you owe me some chili."

"You owe me some fried chicken," Rove joked with his best Southern drawl.

"Well, I saved your life with malaria once," the Democratic strategist recalled.

"Well, yes you did," Rove admitted.

"We go back a long way," Brazile quipped before moving on to point out that the Republican Party "continues to reject the majority of the American people."

"They don't want to be associated with a party that talks down to them, that's condescending, that attacks their rights and them calls them victims," she observed.

While Brazile did not appear to be offended by Rove's remark, certain foods like fried chicken and watermelon have a history of been used to stereotype and slur African-Americans.

"A bucket of fried chicken may suggest nasty racial stereotypes by virtue of its unwholesome image... as much as by its particular history as a plantation staple," Jesse Bering explained in a 2011 column for Slate. "As an unhealthy and inexpensive food, fried chicken invokes images of poverty, ignorance, sloth, and other racist associations."

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Ah yes... Ronald Reagan... that great man of the working people and the American middle class... or at least he was in the alternative reality that is called Peggy Noonan's brain. After her predictions of "Romney rising" in the polls and that the enthusiasm factor would "carry the day" for his big win, Noonan was asked by This Week host George Stephanopoulos about the fact that the presidential election wasn't even close.

Noonan gave the audience a big dose of revisionist history on Reagan. And like most Republicans since Romney lost the election, seems to believe that Republicans don't really need to do anything differently. They just need to work on their messaging. I hate to break it to you Peggy, but it's not just the rhetoric. It's your policies. And they haven't gotten any better since Reagan did his best to help destroy our middle class.

It does seem impossible for Nooners to have a conversation about anything, without dragging out St. Ronnie's corpse to worship. It's pretty humorous given the fact that their party is so far off the cliff these days that he wouldn't make it through a GOP primary race right now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Peggy Noonan, one of the things they're going to have to absorb is one of the points you've made is that this election in the end actually wasn't all that close, President Obama, 330 electoral votes. They're still counting the popular vote...

NOONAN: Yes, they are.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but he's above the -- he has more than a 3 percent lead over Mitt Romney right now.

NOONAN: Yeah. I think -- I mean, from the beginning, it struck me as this is not just the re-election of a president. This is the rebuffing, if that's the right word, of the Republicans.

Look, I think there are many lessons to be learned over this election. There was a not ideal candidate. It was a not ideal campaign, et cetera, et cetera. But, yes, America is -- in America, something's always being born. It's always changing. Demographically it's changing. At the end of the day, elections are actually about ideas. They're about the stands each party takes.

The Republicans do have to sit down and say, what are we doing? And as important, how are we doing it?

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After watching the media obsess over this story all day long, all I can say is thank you Jon Stewart for bringing a little humor and sanity to the matter. Stewart dismantles the Gen. David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell scandal as only he can. Thankfully Eric Cantor was not spared and neither were the conspiracy theorists in the media and over at Fox.

After bemoaning the fact that it was “Captain America” who was found to be having an affair, Stewart went through a portion of his interview from earlier this year with Broadwell and said this about not realizing at the time the affair was going on:

STEWART: The whole thing was like innuendo after innuendo and the whole time, I was like... daaaahhh! I didn't pick up at... I had her right there talking about how thick of a coat of awesome sauce Petraeus is bathed in. The thing never crossed my f**king mind! The whole time, I was just staring at how defined her arms were and trying to think of another version of one of my classic “I'm an asthmatic old Jew” jokes. I am the worst journalist in the world! For God's sake, the title of her book was All In!

Stewart then moved on to the media and the way they covered the story, starting with The Today Show deciding that serial adulterer Newt Gingrich should be the one they turn to for an interview on the the topic. He then moved onto the various conspiracy theories being bantered about.

STEWART: Conspiracy number one: The FBI held back the Petraeus story to prevent Obama from losing the election. […] If only a Republican had known about this on election day.

Cue failure number one and Eric Cantor being informed about the scandal before President Obama. Conspiracy number two, the timing is suspicious and now Petraeus is not going to testify about Benghazi. Or maybe not.

STEWART: They jacked him. Right before he was about to testify on Benghazi. Conspiracy number two: Now we'll never know what Petraeus knew... unless quitting is different from dying and has no bearing on whether Petraeus will have to testify. […] Or will he? Oh, he will. […]

Conspiracy number three: Either the President of the United States blackmailed the head of the CIA, forcing him to agree with the administration's lie, or that theory is stupid. Can't be both!

Cue clueless Peggy Noonan comparing the scandal to Homeland and Stewart rightfully pointing out that the details right now look a lot more like an episode of Melrose Place.

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From this Saturday's Journal Editorial Report, Peggy Noonan, like a lot of other Republicans, are trying to figure out what the GOP should do to keep from suffering the kind of losses they did during this presidential election. Needless to say, like most of them, she doesn't seem to understand that they're going to need to do more than just change their rhetoric.

Peggy Noonan: "Republican Party Has Much To Think About":

"This was a solid win for the president and I think that the Republican party has much to think about here going into the future," Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said on FOX News' "Journal Editorial Report" this weekend.

Noonan, however, says Republicans don't need to rethink their principles such as limited government, but how to present such ideas.

"The way the party goes forward sometimes, it is a way that unnecessarily, I think, occasionally turns people off," Noonan opined. "I also think, a big lesson for the Republican party in this election is to look at America, look at the Republican base -- the famous Republican base -- and see that this is not expanding anymore; this is where it is, maybe it is beginning to detract." [...]

"One of the things I think the party will have to do now is listen to certain voices, such as up here in New York, Heather Higgins of IWF (Independent Women's Forum). She has been some time to party political professionals the answer is not to drill deep into the base; the answer is to expand the base. And that is through going to people, that is through conversation, that is through talking to them about the issues that they case about. It is not operating from 'up here' with big ads that just press people's buttons; it's operating in a way like the Obama campaign did. It's going down on to the ground and talking to people. It's labor intensive, but it's a way of growing. It's a wake of persuading people, which I think Republicans have gotten kind of bad at," she said.

Here's more on that from Laura Clawson at Daily KOS -- Stunned Republicans try to figure out what went wrong and repackage for the future:

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I don't know about anyone else, but I think poor Paul Krugman should have gotten hazard pay for having to appear on the set with Mary Matalin and Peggy Noonan and being tag teamed by their hackery at the same time. ABC's George Stephanopoulos called it a "great round table" when this debacle was over. I've got news for you George. There are a lot of words you could use for this panel segment, most of which I can't use here because we like to keep the site safe for work, but "great" isn't one of them.

Book-ended around the portion of the segment where Mary Matalin was raging on and calling Paul Krugman a liar, we were also treated to Peggy Noonan attempting to do a rewrite on Mitt Romney's policies after he flip flopped again during the first debate and her pretending he worked well with the other side of the aisle as Governor of Massachusetts. She ran up against both Krugman and ABC's Johnathan Karl calling her out for her nonsense, but when Karl brought up the fact that he set a record for the number of vetoes, she just shrugged it off.

Heaven forbid any reality is allowed to be acknowledged if it gets in the way of their talking points.

Transcript below the fold of Noonan doing her best to get the Etch-a-Sketch out for Mitt Romney and his debate performance.

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Republican strategist Mary Matalin on Sunday attempted to lecture Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, saying he had "lied" by claiming Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's wanted to turn Medicare into a voucher system.

During panel discussion on ABC's This Week, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan asserted that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had held himself during last week's debate by appearing to be "a completely moderate, centrist figure."

"Except that everything he used to claim his centrism wasn't true," Krugman pointed out. "So, this is a question. Does that start to take its toll over the next few months... When you say my plan covers pre-existing conditions when it doesn't and when your own campaign has admitted in the past that it doesn't, what do you say? That's amazing."

"You have mischaracterized and you have lied about every position and every particular of the Ryan plan on Medicare," Matalin interrupted, "from the efficiency of the Medicare administration to calling it a voucher plan."

"It is a voucher plan," Krugman replied.

"You are hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar," Matalin quipped.

Krugman quickly returned to Romney's claim during the debate, that his health care plan covered pre-existing conditions.

"I just think that pre-existing thing was a defining moment," he observed. "It was saying this guy believes -- not only did he say something that isn't true, but something that his own campaign has admitted isn't true. And he can say it in front of 70 million people. That's amazing."

As Think Progress noted, Ryan himself has described his plan as "converting Medicare into defined contribution sort of voucher system."

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From this Sunday's Face the Nation, Peggy Noonan once again proves herself to be one of the more petty and partisan pundits out there, even though she normally does her best to dress that up with lofty rhetoric which generally amounts to nothing more than empty platitudes.

I wish it were as easy as she pretends here to just ignore or blow off just how damaging to our country the Republicans obstructing just about everything President Obama has tried to get passed since he got elected has been to some meaningful economic recovery in America. I for one am sick and tired of any of them pretending, as the panel did here, that St. Ronnie or any other president could have dealt with this obstructionist, do-nothing, record setting with their refusal to work with the other side Republican House and filibustering minority in the Senate.

Tell those people who are still out of work "boo-hoo" Peggy and see what kind of response you get.

SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, that brings up a point. I mean, you know, this week you saw President Obama say, look, what I have learned is you can't run Washington from the inside, that you have to run it from the outside.

I guess what he meant was you have to bring pressure from the outside. But, you know, one of the main criticisms of President Obama is he's not very good at the inside game. And one reason that we're in the gridlock we're in right now is he is just not good at brokering deals.

NOONAN: Totally true.

CORN: But I disagree with that. I think, if you look at the tax cut deal after the November 2010 elections, that he actually got a lot more than the Republicans, if you look how he got START passed and "Don't ask, Don't tell." There are a lot of stories in which he has gone and done stuff, kind of, more on the inside than on the outside, and it's ticked off his base because they haven't seen this because it has been too much inside Washington. So it, sort of, cuts both ways.

STENGEL: He's nostalgic for the Obama of 2008 when he could run as an outsider. It's always easier to run, even when you're an incumbent, to run as an outsider. And he doesn't have that message anymore. So he lapsed back into that. The problem is he hasn't shown us why he as president needs to be rehired.

NOONAN: When a president of four years says, excuse me, "You can't change Washington from the inside," he is saying "I failed to change Washington from the inside."

He could not negotiate. He was no Reagan sitting down with Tip O'Neill.

GERGEN: Exactly.

NOONAN: If you if you are big, you can make a deal with the other side; you can move it forward. If you can't do that, then I guess you have to talk about how you can't change things.

GERGEN: I want to come back to this. I don't think you can read the Bob Woodward book and conclude that President Obama is good at the inside game. You just can't read it and figure that.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: But anyway, he's a (INAUDIBLE), he has spent a lot of time doing it. But beyond that, you know, the classic book on the presidency was written by Dick Neustadt years ago, it's called "Presidential Power."

His whole argument was it is a combination. You have to be good at the outside game and the inside game. So two together. And President Obama's notion that you can do this from the outside simply doesn't work in contemporary politics.

(CROSSTALK)

SCHIEFFER: Well, have we ever had a president that was really good at both?

GERGEN: We have had occasional presidents who were really good at both.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: Reagan was the best.

NOONAN: Ronald Reagan.

GERGEN: And Clinton was very good at it.

NOONAN: Ronald Reagan, LBJ, up to a certain extent.

(CROSSTALK)

CORN: ... the party Republicans, though. And, you know, you listen so someone like -- you know, look at the book that Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann wrote, and they're not flaming radicals.

And they blame the obstructionism mainly, almost essentially, on the Republicans coming in and saying, we don't care if you are Clinton or Ronald Reagan, we are just going to throw monkey wrenches into the works again and again and again, and see what happens at the next election.

NOONAN: Oh, my goodness. Boo-hoo.

(CROSSTALK)

NOONAN: Boo-hoo.

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