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Chris Matthews actually tried to get a coherent response out of now ex-chairman of the astroturf FreedomWorks about why Republicans claim to be the party of small government, but they can't seem to keep themselves from inserting government into women's reproductive health or from hating on gay people and insisting that they can't get married. Armey's response was to basically fling as much poo as he could find in the direction of the other party and say "but the Democrats...":

Armey acknowledged there had been several “foolish mistakes” the GOP made during the campaign season, including Mitt Romney’s remarks about the 47%. He insisted the party was trying to “rediscover its relationship” with constitutional limitations on big government and fiscal responsibility.

Host Chris Matthews asked why, if the Republicans are really the party of limited government, does the party have its candidates trying to get rid of contraception, and outlaw gay marriage and abortion. “Why don’t you stay out of people’s lives if you really wanted limited government?” asked Matthews.

The former lawmaker insisted that there were simply a few bad apple candidates, just like the Democrats have “had a few rather strange people,” too. When Matthews pointed out the GOP platform includes items about personhood and contraception, Armey insisted the Democrats also have “unusual” and “strange” items in their platform.

“Name one,” Matthews challenged.

“Homosexual marriage, all right. Abortion on demand,” Armey shot back. “These issues are in your platform. You don’t think it’s strange for these issues to be in your platform pointing in one direction, but you consider it outrageous that the other party has the same issues pointing in the another direction in their platform.”

Matthews responded, “The Democratic party generally supports Roe vs. Wade. It does not support ‘abortion on demand,’” adding the issue of gay marriage is going to be decided state by state, not nationally.

Matthews tried to get Armey to dish on FreedomWorks a bit more, now that he's taken the $8 million golden parachute of a retirement they paid so they could be rid of him, but Armey didn't have much to say on that front and was still trying to pretend that they're some grassroots movement -- and not a rebranding effort to get the Bush-stink off the word Republican. Driftglass has more on that and Dick Armey from back in 2010 here.

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If anyone needed further proof that Sean Hannity's show on Fox "news" is a complete clown show, here you go. After complaining about House Speaker John Boehner stripping some of these "tea partiers" from their committee assignments and even the possibility of him negotiating with President Obama over this so-called "fiscal cliff," guest Mark Steyn called Rep. Louie Gohmert "one of the few serious people in Congress."

Louie Gohmert.... terror babies Louie Gohmert.

Here's more of the recent insanity that's come out of that man's mouth in case anyone's forgotten.

Rep. Gohmert: ‘Slavery was a blot’ but U.S. is worse off now

Gohmert: Contraception mandate is like banning communion

Gohmert to 'Numbnuts' McCain: Shut Up About Bachmann’s Anti-Muslim Witch Hunt

Louie Gohmert (R-TX): George W. Bush Did A Better Job in Afghanistan Than Obama

Rep. Louis Gohmert says Obama has more of an allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood than America

'Terror Babies' Gohmert: Libya Goal Is To "Deplete The Military" So Obama Can Call Up Private Army

Rachel Maddow: More Guns Does Not Equal Less Crime

'Terror Babies' Louie Gohmert Predicts Doom for America and the Military From Repeal of DADT

Update: The Huffington Post noted on Wednesday that Gohmert was the only member of Congress to vote against a bill that would have removed the term "lunatic" from all federal laws.

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After pointing out that Republicans are no longer having success running on issues like inner city crime and opining over New York's Time Square becoming "a Disney-fied, bubble gum, wimp company" where "the worst that could happen is one of those giant M&M's tries to flash you his peanuts," Colbert opined over the fact that
this disturbing lack of violence isn't just a problem for our cities" but for the Republican party as well.

As Colbert noted, in this last election Republicans lost the blacks, the women, young voters, Latinos by 44 percent and "even more surprising, they failed to get 100 percent of the white male vote." Colbert had a suggestion for a new wedge issues if Republicans want to turn the voter tide back in their favor -- white male patriarchy.

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Fox's Andrea Tantaros, who recently made jokes about living off of the food stamp program as a dieting technique, actually had the gall to attack Sandra Fluke as a "terrible person to elevate" after Fluke's nomination by Time for Person of the Year.

Of course, attacking Fluke is nothing new for Tantaros, who went after her this August as well, saying that "no woman should aspire to be" Sandra Fluke.

And now that Fluke has received her nomination, Tantaros isn't the only one over at Fox or in the right wing media going after her -- Right-Wing Media Launch Attacks After Sandra Fluke Nominated For Time "Person Of The Year" .

Tantaros continued the tradition of lying completely about Fluke and what she was advocating for and after watching this I can say one thing. Fox and their Republican allies don't look like they learned a damned thing from the losses they just took among women during the last election. Keep it up wingnuts.

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Scarce edit: If you'd like to vote for Sandra Fluke you can do so at this link:

Sandra Fluke as Time's Person of the Year

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I've heard Lady-Mc-Cheney, Mary Matalin say a lot of ridiculous things in her defense of Mitt Romney, but this segment from Anderson Cooper's show on CNN this Thursday evening may have set a new low, even for Matalin's standards, which generally range from low to non-existent. Apparently labor unions, paying people minimum wage instead of slave wages and poverty programs that keep people from starving when times are tough are harming upward mobility in America.

And in this idiot's world, women being allowed to control their own reproductive health and having access to birth control is not one of the primary economic factors in most women's lives, but instead something that has no affect on whether they get "upward mobility opportunities" as well. Really astounding from someone who I assume was alive and cognizant during the last half a century or so and who has been around long enough to maybe remember the days when women were discriminated against because they might not be able to remain at a job, because heaven forbid they might end up pregnant.

Who needs misogynistic men around when you've got women like Matalin doing as much or more damage to her own gender as her male counterparts could ever hope to do.

As to the rest of the segment on CNN, I was glad to see The New York Times' Charles Blow call out Matalin for presuming to know what's best for African-American voters and the fact that you can't separate the issues she was discussing from the economic impact on the lives of average American workers, no matter what their race or gender.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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After a stinging election night defeat, President George W. Bush's former White House secretary still says that the Republican Party will never support LGBT rights and reproductive rights for women.

"The big issue that Republicans are going to have to wrestle with is the Hispanic issue," Ari Fleischer explained after President Barack Obama's defeat of GOP hopeful Mitt Romney made it clear that the country was more liberal than he had expected.

"It's not the social issues," he insisted. "You're not going to make the party pro-choice and pro-gay rights and think you've made the Republican party the party that's the popular party. We have a party like that. It's the Democratic Party."

"But the Republican Party used to be against abortion," CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted. "In the past year, they have become identified with opposition to contraception. That is, you know, moving backwards at a pace that is astonishing and politically disastrous."

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From this Sunday's This Week, apparently George Will believes women aren't capable of worrying about more than one topic at a time and doesn't realize that it's the likes of him pretending that women's ability to control their own contraception is not an economic issue as well as a health issue is what's really offensive to "educated" women.

WILL: There has been a big change. It's not a particular state. It's the change in Romney's gain among women. And that, I think, represents a huge recoil by professional women with college degrees against the condescension of the Obama campaign, which says -- Austan, hang on -- which says, essentially, don't you trouble your pretty little heads about these men's issue like unemployment and all the rest. Worry about contraception, which has been a constitutional right for 47 years. It's a distraction, the entire war on women trope, and I think professional, educated women find it offensive.

Here's more from Media Matters on why he's so dangerously wrong as well -- George Will Dismisses Romney's Anti-Women's Rights Stances:

While it is true that the Supreme Court ruled in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut that state governments cannot ban access to contraception, Mitt Romney supports the Blunt Amendment, legislation that would allow business owners to withdraw insurance coverage for contraception or any other medical treatment.

Moreover, Clarence Thomas, one of the justices that Romney has said will serve as a model for his judicial nominations, has said that he agreed with the dissenting judge in Griswold, who said that contraception bans are constitutionally valid.

In addition to his stance on contraception, Romney has said that he would appoint Supreme Court justices that would likely try to overturn the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision -- a goal Romney has had since at least 2007. Appointing anti-Roe v. Wade judges to the Supreme Court could have drastic consequences. According to Tony Mauro of USA Today: "If a President Romney gets to appoint replacements for liberals Ginsburg and Breyer, then abortion rights, gay rights, affirmative action and campaign-finance reform could well be in serious jeopardy." Romney has also reportedly opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which provides women more legal room to file pay discrimination claims against employers.

The Roe v. Wade decision awarded women a fundamental right in 1973, which Romney has repeatedly promised to revoke, calling it "one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history." To George Will and other conservative media, women's rights remain a "distraction."

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My reaction to this segment by MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry reminds me a whole lot of how I felt after initially listening to Rep. Jackie Speier's remarks on the House floor, after finally being fed up with listening to her colleagues demonize Planned Parenthood and abortion. It's every bit as brave, honest and powerful and something every one of these anti-woman, anti-abortion zealots ought to have to listen to, after Richard Mourdock's callous remarks about conception via rape being "God's will."

For rape survivors, Mourdock’s remark was an(other) attack on consent:

Dear Mr. Mourdock,

Sometimes I still flinch when I’m touched a certain way, even if it’s the loving embrace of my husband. I can’t stand to watch TV shows where rape is the central plot line. Even some seasons of the year are harder for me. Those of us who are sexual assault survivors call these triggers. We spend our lives — the lives we lead after the attack — avoiding and managing these triggers.

A congressional debate shouldn’t have to come with a trigger warning. But apparently, Richard, yours should. Because in Tuesday’s debate for Indiana’s U.S. Senate seat, you said this Tuesday night during a debate in New Albany, Indiana.

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Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who is now a surrogate for Mitt Romney, on Sunday told President Barack Obama's deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter to "get over it" and stop talking about Republican Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's assertion that pregnancy from rape "is something that God intended to happen."

Speaking to ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Cutter noted that a Des Moines Register editorial endorsing Romney "didn't seem to be based at all in reality" because it claimed the Republican candidate would govern in a bipartisan way and "it's the exact opposite of what he did in Massachusetts."

"Over the course of running for president over these last six years, he's never once stood up to the far extreme right wing," Cutter explained. "Just this past week, we saw it when he wouldn't take down his ad for Richard Mourdock, who had -- it's a now famous comment that it's God's will if a woman gets pregnant through rape. He's not willing to stand up when it matters."

But Gingrich told Stephanopoulos that Mourdock had only said what opponents of abortion had been saying for years.

"If you listen to what Mourdock actually said, he said what virtually every Catholic and every fundamentalist in the country actually believes: life begins at conception," the Romney surrogate shrugged. "This seems to be fixated by the Democrats, but the radical on abortion is Obama, who as a state senator voted three times in favor of allowing doctors to kill babies in the eighth and ninth month who were born having survived late term abortions."

While Stephanopoulos did not push back on Gingrich's claim, several organization have debunked the claim that Obama ever supported a so-called “infanticide” provision in an Illinois measure that would have required doctors to administer medical treatment to fetuses that survived an abortion.

However, the ABC host did press the former House Speaker on whether he agreed with Mourdock that pregnancy through rape is "something God intended to happen."

"He also immediately issued a clarification saying that he was referring to the act of contraception and he condemned rape," Gingrich insisted. "One point of this is nonsense. Every candidate in America that I know condemns rape."

"So, why can't people like Stephanie Cutter get over it? We all condemn rape. Now let's talk about whether we also condemn killing babies in the eighth and ninth month."

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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani says that if President Barack Obama's health care reform law is going to force insurance companies to cover contraception then "it's only fair" that men are provided with pills to treat erectile dysfunction.

Speaking to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce earlier this week, the surrogate for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney hinted at the controversy over the Obama's administration's mandate that all health insurance cover contraception for women and warned that the "commissars in Washington" could expand coverage even further in the future.

"They get to write the list of what is legally sufficient health insurance," he explained. "I hate to bring this up because I don't think Gov. Romney would like me to bring this up, but I will. This is what made health care in Massachusetts three times more expensive than people thought. Because when they sat down to define health insurance, everybody added everything to the list and the cost of health insurance went way up."

"That's going to happen on a national level," Giuliani continued. "And you know an Obama appointed commission is going to cover everything. If you cover condoms, I mean, you've got to cover everything, right?"

"If you cover condoms, you should cover Viagra. It's only fair."

In fact, most insurance companies -- including plans offered by Catholic institutions -- began covering Viagra as soon it became available in 1998.

(h/t: The Blaze)