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Who needs Fox when we've got the talking heads over at CBS doing their best to keep up with them. Here's what the viewers were treated to just after Bob Schieffer's pearl clutching over whether David Axelrod was willing to use the word lie (gasp!) when talking about Mitt Romney -- CBS News Covers For Romney Campaign's Tax Doublespeak:

CBS chief political correspondent John Dickerson disputed President Obama's description of Mitt Romney's tax plan as a "$5 trillion tax cut" because one of Romney's advisers suggested he would reduce the size of his proposed tax cuts if he could not pay for them. But Dickerson is ignoring the fact that Romney running mate Paul Ryan suggested last week that Romney would not reduce the size of his tax cuts because lowering taxes is his highest priority.

During a panel discussion on the presidential debate on Face The Nation, Dickerson said that it was unfair to accuse Romney of being dishonest about his tax plan. Dickerson explained that a top Romney economic adviser "said we have two goals here. One is deficit reduction, the other is reducing marginal rates. If those come in conflict our primary goal is deficit reduction and the marginal rates might not go down as much."

That stands in direct contrast to remarks by Paul Ryan, who was asked specifically if Mitt Romney would "scale back on the 20 percent tax cut for the wealthy" if the cuts could not be paid for and replied "No, no.".

Dickerson also did his best to play the "both sides" are equally terrible false equivalency game by attempting to equate Romney's constant lying on the campaign trail about anything and everything he's done to President Obama for not keeping a campaign pledge to cut the budget in half and not closing Gitmo. As Axelrod rightfully pointed out, the comparison is utterly ridiculous, considering he was at the mercy of Congress on accomplishing both.

Whether Axelrod is right about the lies catching up, who knows, but it seems CBS is more than willing to do their part to help Romney out and gloss over them.

Transcript below the fold.

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The one thing you can say about this Cheney family -- they've got their lies and they're sticking to them -- no matter what. After feeling the need to give the Bush administration some glowing praise for torture, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay, Bill O'Reilly actually challenged the assertion that we were greeted as liberators in Iraq made by Dick Cheney years ago on Meet the Press. Naturally, his daughter Liz, disagreed.

O'Reilly pointed to the falling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and that there was only a very small group of people there as evidence that we were not greeted as liberators. What Billo failed to point out to her during this softball interview, is that event was staged by our military as our own Silent Patriot reminded us of back on the 4th anniversary of that event.

As to Cheney still repeating the "greeted as liberators" line, John Amato wrote about this back in 2007 when John McCain was carrying water for the Bush administration, repeating that already tired and debunked line back then as well:

John McCain told Tim Russert that America was greeted as liberators when we got to Iraq. What is he talking about. When were we ever greeted as liberators? It wasn't like ten months of peace and tranquility. The looting began almost immediately. He also says that the war was easy. Easy for who?

One thing we can count on is that as long as these neocons and supporters of the Iraq invasion are still alive, they're going to do their best to continue to revise the history books in their favor.

Full transcript below the fold.

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While discussing whether our so-called national security apparatus has grown too large and unwieldy in the aftermath of 9-11 on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asks Brit Hume if he thinks Americans' civil liberties are in jeopardy. Naturally, Hume says he's not concerned and actually goes so far as to say that we've responded really reasonably to the attacks on 9-11 because hey, at least we're not locking people up in Japanese internment camps like we did during World War II.

I think Hume might feel a bit differently if he were say, a member of a Muslim mosque, an ACLU lawyer representing a terrorism suspect, someone who found themselves placed on the no-fly list for no good reason, or perhaps one of the people who were unfortunate enough to find themselves swooped up without a trial and thrown into Gitmo and tortured. But Hume is no Maher Arar. As a resident hack at Fox "News", he doesn't feel he's got anything to worry about, so it's all good, people. Just go about your business and don't worry about that pesky data mining they're doing or how much of your personal information they're collecting. Nothing to see here. Move along.

WALLACE: Brit, in the wake of 9-11 with some of the legal structure, the counter-terrorism architecture that was created with warrantless wiretaps and Patriot Act, there were critics who said that our civil liberties were in jeopardy. Do you see any sign of that's happened?

HUME: Well, I think there's always... you have to be vigilant about that, but what I think is striking about it is how... you know, I don't think any, very many Americans to speak of have any worry about their civil liberties. I mean we're... speech is as free as it's ever been, except for political correctness and that's not a function of the war on terror. Debates are as robust as ever.

I have no worries about my multitudeness (sic) communications on the Internet or anywhere else being supervised by some government official somewhere. I just don't worry about that very much and I don't think most Americans do. I think vigilance is reasonable about such things, but what's striking about this is how little we've done.

When you think about World War II and we were, you know, we locked up Japanese in prison camps. Nothing like that has happened. Nothing on that scale, nothing of that kind.

From Democracy Now -- WikiLeaks Documents Reveal U.S. Knowingly Imprisoned 150 Innocent Men at Guantánamo:

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun releasing thousands of secret documents from the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay that reveal the Bush and Obama administrations knowingly imprisoned more than 150 innocent men for years without charge. In dozens of cases, senior U.S. commanders were said to have concluded that there was no reason for the men to have been transferred to Guantánamo. Among the innocent prisoners were an 89-year-old Afghan villager and a 14-year-old boy who had been kidnapped. Some men were imprisoned at Guantánamo simply because they wore a popular model of Casio watches, which had been used as timers by al-Qaeda. The documents also reveal that the journalist Sami al-Hajj was held at Guantánamo for six years partly in order to be interrogated about his employer, the Al Jazeera network. Al-Hajj’s file said he was sent to Guantánamo in order to "provide information on ... the Al-Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan." For more, we speak with journalist Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

Full transcript at Democracy Now's site.

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A reoccurring theme at Fox News seems to be that alleged terrorists should be killed rather than tried in a court of law or military tribunal.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade became the latest personality to add his voice to the mix Monday.

In a segment designed to highlight the fact that the Obama administration still has not brought any of the 9/11 co-conspirators to justice, Kilmeade explained that the message to US forces is that alleged terrorists should be killed instead of captured.

"I will say this, the message is to our special forces, the message is to our CIA, kill them in the field because we can't find a way to try them at home," Kilmeade told Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr.

Kilmeade added, "And that might have some good points but the bad points is that we can't get intelligence out of them if we don't have them here to interrogate."

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Well, this is something you don't see every day. Ralph Nader hosted this interview segment with Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano and discussed his book, Lies the Government Told You. I'm surprised the judge is going to be allowed on Fox after making the statements he did about Bush and Cheney during the interview.

Nader: What about the more serious violations of habeas corpus. You know after 9-11 Bush rounded up thousands of them, Americans, many of them Muslim Americans or Arabic Americans and they were thrown in jail without charges, they didn't have lawyers, some of them were pretty mistreated in New York City. You know they were all released eventually.

Napolitano: Correct.

Nader: Is that what you mean also about throwing people in jail without charges violating habeas corpus?

Napolitano: Well that is so obviously a violation of the natural law, the natural right to be brought before a neutral arbiter within moments of the government taking your freedom away from you. And the Constitution itself, as the Supreme Court in the Boumediene case pretty much said, wherever the government goes, the Constitution goes with it and wherever the Constitution goes are the rights of the Constitution as a guarantee and habeas corpus cannot be suspended by the president ever. It can only be suspended by the Congress in times of rebellion which in read Milligan says meaning rebellion of such magnitude that judges can't get into their court houses. That has not happened in American history.

So what President Bush did with the suspension of habeas corpus, with the whole concept of Guantanamo Bay, with the whole idea that he could avoid and evade federal laws, treaties, federal judges and the Constitution was blatantly unconstitutional and is some cases criminal.

Nader: What's the sanction for President Bush and Vice President Cheney?

Napolitano: There's been no sanction except what history will say about them.

Nader: What should be the sanctions?

Napolitano: They should have been indicted. They absolutely should have been indicted for torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants. I'd like to say they should be indicted for lying but believe it or not, unless you're under oath, lying is not a crime. At least not an indictable crime. It's a moral crime.

Nader: So you think George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should even though they've left office, they haven't escaped the criminal laws, they should be indicted and prosecuted?

Napolitano: The evidence in this book and in others, our colleague the great Vincent Bugliosi has amassed an incredible amount of evidence. The purpose of this book was not to amass that evidence but I do discuss it, is overwhelming when you compare it to the level of evidence required for a normal indictment that George W. Bush as President and Dick Cheney as Vice President participated in criminal conspiracies to violate the federal law and the guaranteed civil liberties of hundreds, maybe thousands of human beings.

They go on to discuss how these crimes have gone on unpunished and how the practices have continued under Obama and that as long as our citizens are willing to accept government deception and as long as the Justice Department and the lawyers in this country are not going to pursue these cases in court it's never going to stop. It's a topic that our media is happy to help brush under the rug as well.

UPDATE: If you would like to watch the entire hour long interview from Book TV, C-SPAN has it available in their video library here.

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Politicians on both sides of the aisle have questioned an Obama administration plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian courts. But the alternative -- military tribunals -- may prevent suspects from being sentenced to the harshest of penalties.

Attorney General Eric Holder told CBS News Sunday that it may not be possible to sentence detainees to death if they plead guilty in a military tribunal.

"Can you, in fact, seek the death penalty when you take someone before a military tribunal?" asked CBS' Bob Schieffer. "I know you can in a civilian court because I've had some lawyers tell me that that might not be possible [in a military tribunal]."

"You can seek the death penalty," explained Holder. "There's a real question as to whether someone can plead guilty and get the death penalty on the military side. You can certainly do that in a civilian setting."

"It's interesting nobody has made much of that. That this is so controversial. I'm surprised that those of you that favor the civilian trial haven't said to some who want to put these people before a military tribunal, 'look, we might not get the death penalty,'" noted Schieffer.

But Holder resisted using the death penalty as an argument for civilian trials.

"One of the thing that is particularly bothersome to me, this is something that has become political. The politicization of this issue when we're dealing with ultimate national security issues is something that disturbs me a great deal," said Holder.

Barack Obama thinks he can be trusted with the power, but he's being stalked by a strange and twisted creature who wants to take the precious away.

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From CNN's State of the Union, John Boehner with his daily dose of fear mongering on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Heaven forbid we can't try them here because their friends might come and get us.

CROWLEY: One last question, and this is on terrorism. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and civilian trials versus military tribunals. It appears that there may be a deal in the works which the president would reverse the Holder decision -- Attorney General Holder's decision to try these 9-11 suspects in a civilian court to perhaps a military tribunal in exchange for money to bring some of these prisoners they can't try and put them in a super-max wherever they decide. Is that acceptable to you?

BOEHNER: We'll have to see what the final pieces of this look like. But we have -- we have a world class facility at Guantanamo. And -- and--

(CROSSTALK)

CROWLEY: But they're going to close that. You know that? I mean--

BOEHNER: Well, no they're not. They -- they keep saying they are. But they want $500 million from this Congress to rehabilitate this prison in northwest Illinois. I want to see who the members are who are going to vote for this. I wouldn't vote for this if you put a gun to my head.

CROWLEY: But it's such a -- Guantanamo Bay has such a bad feel to it across the world. And that's one of the reasons given for -- fine -- it's a great facility. But it's one of the reasons that people in the world looked at America and thought they have really strayed from their value system.

So if you were to move -- which has been a very important Republican point on foreign policy. If you were to move these trials into a military tribunal, why not say, "Fine, bring them? Guantanamo Bay has a bad feel to it. Let's put them in a super max and be done with it."

BOEHNER: Well, I think we have a world class facility at Guantanamo. I think it's the appropriate -- appropriate place to hold these prisoners. And they can do the -- the tribunals right there at Guantanamo. There is no reason to bring these terrorists into the United States. No reason to increase the threat level here, because they're here. Their friends may want to come. It makes no sense to me. And I don't think the Congress will appropriate one dime to move those prisoners from Guantanamo to the United States.

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Bill-O with a bit of fear mongering on what the United States should be doing with terrorism suspects, which is trying them in civilian court and not military tribunals. I understand the objections to the trials being held in New York but there’s no reason they could not be moved to another court in the United States. Of course O’Reilly simplifies this to the point of fighting “bad guys” and claims that Gitmo hasn’t been a recruiting tool. His proof… they’d still hate us if we closed it.

Well, yeah since that’s not the only reason we’ve got a terrorism problem. Heaven forbid the likes of O’Reilly might recognize that our foreign policy in general and the extreme poverty of desperate people might just have something to do with people being willing to blow themselves up or kill themselves to make a political point.

The Obama administration is making a huge mistake with this decision and one result that’s already manifesting itself is giving this asshat this talking point when it didn’t have to happen.

O’Reilly: Politically speaking we can look at this two ways. On the positive side President Obama could reverse a bad policy and that is a good thing. On the negative side Holder’s civilian trial vision was so misguided it’s almost frightening. Apparently Holder thinks America is on trial here—that our anti-terrorism strategies need to be justified to the world. That is a dangerous point of view that would get Americans killed in the future.

If the Obama administration is going to back track and make themselves look like flip floppers while making deals with Lindsey Graham, I sure as hell hope they got something in return for it. Given their track record so far on how the health care debate went, I’m not optimistic about the prospect that they did. For now they’re giving Fox their talking points that the Attorney General hates America and that these military tribunals which don’t have good results are a better way to go than civilian trials. Bravo.