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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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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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Time magazine's Joe Klein is a notorious hack, no two ways about it, with decades of evidence to back it up. But in his latest installment of "But they do it too!", he goes farther into realms of false equivalency that are not just noxious, as usual, but truly bizarre. How anyone can claim, with a straight face, that the current Bain attacks follow the same line of descent as the Willie Horton attacks against Dukakis in 1988, or even the Swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004 is beyond me. Such a master of self-delusion and cynicism is Joe Klein, that he cares so little about the methods of political attack, and is solely concerned with the outcomes. In Klein's world, where politics are an amoral game, the ends always justify the means.

And naturally when Klein regaled a group on NBCNews's Morning Joe with his stunning insight Republicans Joe Scarborough and Bushie Dan Senor could barely contain their glee, loving every minute of it.

Here is part of Klein's "thesis", from Swampland:

Mitt Romney is experiencing a Dukakis-like summer playing defense. The Obama campaign has also constructed a brilliant coffin, custom-made for a turnaround artist. There are many nails in this coffin, some more important than others. The nails are being hammered in a natural progression. There is a logic to this. The current controversy over whether Romney was or was not running Bain capital during the years 1999-2002 is a relatively minor nail–the functional equivalent of the Pledge of Allegiance. Bain was involved in the global economy during those years. This meant outsourcing jobs to places like Mexico and China, which meant the creative destruction of obsolete jobs here at home. Whether Romney was directing them or not, these activities were perfectly legal. That doesn’t matter, though: there is confusion about why he was still listed as the boss if he wasn’t really the boss, which seems shifty. And there’s the question of why he was making tons of money if he wasn’t the boss, which is what this is really all about.

Indeed, that’s the Willie Horton argument building against Romney. Democrats were appalled by the Horton ads (the most devastating was produced by an “independent” committee, “unrelated” to the Bush campaign). They were, allegedly, racist. Horton was black. But they cut to the heart of a significant problem the Democratic Party had at the time: it was sort of soft on crime, in the midst of the post-Vietnam left’s “they’re depraved because they’re deprived” delusion. And Mitt Romney’s Willie Horton? His tax returns.

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On this weekend's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews' "Big Question" for the week was this: Of the Republicans running for president, which one offers the best chance of becoming, a great president? The response, mainly crickets by his panelists John Heilemann, Kelly O'Donnell, Gloria Borger. The only one willing to give him an answer was Joe Klein.

His response of what Republican president might end up on Mount Rushmore -- Barack Obama. That's a pretty sad state of affairs with our current field of Republican candidates when all of them were not willing to say anything good about any of them.

And someone should remind Joe Klein that to be an actual Republican these days and not the Villagers imaginary idea of what remains of the Republican Party, you have to be a bat shit crazy ideologue who's not willing to negotiate with anyone on anything if you think there's political gain in it and the public will fall for it.

I'm not any happier than a lot of us with how far both parties have moved to the right and how money is corrupting our political process, but sorry Joe, the party that has run off the cliff with being insane should not have their label attached to our current president.

I'd like for him to be further to the left like the rest of us, and as aggravated as I have gotten with what's he's been willing to concede to the other side and with validating a lot of their talking points, I would not wish having to navigate this current political climate he walked into and the Congress he's been forced to deal with on my worst enemy. And today's current Republican Party does not deserve to have anyone who is even half-way sane tagged with their label. They deserve to be called out for the zealots and TeaBirchers they are that have taken over their party.

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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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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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Joe Scarborough hammered House Minority Whip Eric Cantor about why the Republicans were going to allow Smokey Joe Barton stay in his leadership post despite his retraction on Twitter for his apology for his apology to BP. As Think Progress noted, Cantor tried to brush it off by saying that Barton is not the issue. As they and others have noted, he's right.

Cantor Tries To Brush Off Barton’s Defense Of BP: ‘He Is Not The Issue’:

Yesterday, House Republicans decided to let Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) keep his seat as the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, despite his apology to BP executives last week for the White House’s supposed “shakedown” of the company. Barton apologized to his Republican colleagues during a meeting behind closed doors, and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) apparently though that was enough to excuse Barton for his “poor choice of words.”

This morning on MSNBC, Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) defended his party’s decision, claiming Barton “is not the issue.” Host Joe Scarborough — a former Republican congressman from Florida — repeatedly pressed Cantor on the decision, noting that Barton’s comments are important because he is the “most powerful Republican” on energy issues. The best Cantor could muster was to brush off Barton’s apology to BP as a mere gaffe, comparing him to Vice President Biden:

SCARBOROUGH: But why is Joe Barton allowed to keep his job when Joe Barton apologized to a corporation that is destroying my hometown and its economy and destroying the environment across the Gulf coast?

CANTOR: Joe, listen. Joe Barton is not the issue.

SCARBOROUGH: He kind of is, though. If he is the most powerful Republican on the Hill right now when it comes to energy, he is the issue, isn’t he?

CANTOR: No, he is not. [...]

SCARBOROUGH: Eric, I press you respectfully here, but it was a written statement. You and I both know that sometimes you get tired. Sometimes you say stupid things. I spoke, of course, of myself. I say it every day. You’re like, oh, God, I shouldn’t have said that. You kick yourself. Joe Barton is sitting here reading a statement ‘I apologized to BP!’

MIKA: He’s calling it a poor choice of words.

SCARBOROUGH: That was a calculated statement that shows a troubling mindset and I know you agree with me. You just can’t say it.

CANTOR:Joe, listen. If the standard for resignation is a YouTube moment or an inappropriate statement, wouldn’t you think the Vice President would be handing in his letters twice a week? I mean, come on!

And as they noted the DNC has responded.

DNC National Press Secretary Hari Sevugan issued the following response: “We don’t say this often but, Eric Cantor’s right – Joe Barton’s not the issue. The issue is a broader Republican culture of not just apologizing to the oil industry, but defending them and their other corporate benefactors at every turn and at the expense of middle class families and small businesses."

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Sarah Palin wasn't too happy about what Joe Klein said about her on The Chris Matthews Show.

KLEIN: You know, I did—I did a little bit of research just before the show, it's no this little napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition, which is "conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state." And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck, and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right next—right up close to being seditious.

Here's Palin's response crying to Sean Hannity on his show who Klein also called out but they didn't have much to say about...

PALIN: What a piece of work that Mr. Klein is for the piece that he wrote. That is something else. You know you would hope that the powers that be at a "quote un-quote" reputable organization like Time Magazine, that they would hold their employee and I assume Mr. Klein gets paid for the columns that he writes, that they would hold their employee accountable and they would actually ask him what is it that I or others in the conservative movement have said that would rise to the level of this inciting of violence and revolt and all these other things that evidently he claims.

For them to allow things like that to be printed just really discredits Time Magazine and other organizations that would allow that kind of rhetoric and false reporting. They're lies.

Sarah Palin apparently finds no irony in trashing Time Magazine for not holding their employees responsible for their words or what they write even though she works for a network that is nothing but a propaganda arm of the GOP and that has used racism and the Southern Strategy as a means to promote Republican candidates for office.

I look forward to Klein's response. He may not have gotten really specific during his statements on The Chris Matthews Show. That doesn't mean that Miss Reload should be allowed by the likes of Hannity, who Klein also called out during that segment, to dismiss the crap that's come out of her mouth. We've spent more than enough time documenting Sarah Palin and her hackery at C&L so I'm not going to rehash it here. There's just too much of it.

She and Hannity should not be allowed to be on our airways without disclaimers that right wing hatred is to follow. Sadly the same can be said for about every show on their network. I really do hope Klein responds to this nonsense. I'm no fan of Klein's since he's all too happy to promote Villager group think for my taste, but he was right to call out Palin in this instance.

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After discussing this segment from last weeks show Kathleen Parker and Joe Klein: Tea Party fringe groups are a national security threat; FOX and the Becks are acting seditiously David Ignatius decides to carry some water for Sarah Palin and her fellow hate talkers over at ClusterFox.

Ignatius: Well I…no. If the Republican Party is Fox News and Glenn Beck it will lose in perpetuity. This is not a majority movement. I get worried about words like sedition because I love brother Joe, but it seems to me that implies that there’s impermissible speech; speech that is so extreme, so inflammatory that it really shouldn’t allow it…

Matthews: How about reload?

Ignatius: … in the debate.

Matthews: How about Sarah Palin saying it’s time to reload?

Ignatius: Well, a lot of the things that she says strike me as outrageous. These people make their money being outrageous and Sarah Palin’s now joined that group. But that doesn’t mean that it’s dangerous to the republic. I mean look, our national ideology in some level is Libertarianism. I mean, you know liberals and conservatives agree, don’t tread on me. Don’t take away my freedoms to speak, to do what I want. That’s who we are as a people. These people are expressing an extreme view about it. It doesn’t worry me a lot.

Sorry David, but there are limits on free speech whether you're willing to acknowledge that or not. These Villagers sure like to protect their own even when they recognize that they're completely over the top and out of control. How pathetic is it that he also acknowledges that people who work for an organization that has the word "news" in it are being paid to be "outrageous" and representing an "extreme view" and he doesn't blink an eye about it?