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I assume Rep. Paul Ryan was talking about Bill Clinton during this interview on Meet the Press, and not endorsing Hillary for 2016, since Erskine Bowles was Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff, but this is pretty rich coming from someone who helped to derail the Simpson-Bowles plan when he was a member of that commission.

You also gotta love Republicans praising Bill Clinton (the man their party impeached while he was in office and that they treated with about as much disdain as the current resident of the White House) as some great bipartisan savior with whom they're all enamored now.

I'm sure they do love some of the actual bipartisanship we got from Clinton, like bad trade deals and banking deregulation, but to pretend that this modern-day Republican party would be acting any better if we had a Clinton in office is laughable.

GREGORY: It was interesting, on the day of the inauguration Brian Williams and I and others were talking and we noticed some video during the luncheon after the inauguration. And one of the things that caught our eye was a great moment here, you have your back to us, but there are you and you're speaking. You're with Secretary Clinton but also President Clinton. And that's just one of those moments where you say, "Gosh, what were they talking about?" Any advice there coming from --

(crosstalk)

RYAN: We were talking about personal health. Both of us lost our dads when we were young and we were just talking. I got concussions when I was young and Hillary was talking about hers. And we were just kind of chumming it up. Look, if we had a Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles, Chief Staff of the White House or president of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now. That's not the kind of presidency we're dealing with right now.

GREGORY: And you don't blame conservatives, particularly in the House--

RYAN: Everybody. Look both--

GREGORY: --for thwarting the effort?

RYAN: Both parties. Forget about just the recent past. Both parties got us to the mess we are in, this fiscal crisis. Republicans and Democrats. And you know what? It's going to take both parties to solve this problem. That's the kind of leadership we need today.

GREGORY: So how do you think about 2016 and a presidential run?

PAUL RYAN: I don't.

GREGORY: You don't. You're not thinking about it now?

RYAN: I think it's just premature. I've got an important job to do. I represent Wisconsin. I'm chairman of the budget committee at the time we have a fiscal crisis. I think I can do my job representing the people I work for by focusing on that right now than focusing on these distant things.

GREGORY: But you'll take serious look at it?

RYAN: I'll decide later about that. Right now I'm just focused on this.

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There were a great number of thing wrong with this interview on MSNBC, one being the fact that host Thomas Roberts and his producers thought that the public needed to hear from the corrupt former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert about the need for bipartisanship during these fiscal negotiations. Another is Hastert being allowed to get away with this statement:

ROBERTS: But sir, if you were able to hold the line on spending limits, then why would you go ahead to oversee two unfunded wars?

HASTERT: Look... the wars happened. I don't know if you were around at 9-11 but we lost 3000 people, but we ended up in Afghanistan. We also ended up in Iraq. You know, we can go back. History will tell us whether we should have been in Iraq, but at the time, we thought that was the right decision. We were not going to expose this country to that type of threat and we haven't had it since then.

Roberts just completely let Hastert off the hook here without an ounce of follow up. First off, he didn't answer the question about why they didn't see the need to pay for the two wars that they didn't want to put on the books to show the hole they were blowing in the budget. And second, it's just shameful that a politician is still being allowed to use 9-11 to justify invading Iraq.

And as far as Hastert and anyone wanting his advice on how someone should govern now, here's more from our archives on him, and he received the honor of being listed by Rolling Stone as one of the The Ten Worst Members of the Worst Congress Ever in Tim Dickinson's article which was originally posted in their Nov. 2006 issue. Here's a portion of that report:

The Highway Robber: Dennis Hastert (R-Ill)

Hastert could well be the weakest House speaker in history. Tapped by Tom DeLay to serve as the mild-mannered frontman for the GOP leadership, the former wrestling coach ceded most of his power to the now-disgraced majority leader, allowing Republicans to treat the Capitol as their private piggy bank. Last year, Hastert got in on the action himself, secretly inserting $207 million into the budget for the "Prairie Parkway" – a highway that will speed development of 210 acres he owns in Illinois. Before the year was out, Hastert sold part of his land – soon to be the site of a sprawling subdivision – for a profit of $2 million.

"Here's a guy who saw a chance to profit from his official acts and took it," says Bill Allison, who uncovered the late-night earmark as a senior analyst for the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "Most of us aren't speaker of the House, and most of us don't have a $200 million earmark running through our back yard. Hastert does, and he made a fortune from it."

The speaker at least functions as a bipartisan defender of congressional corruption. In February 2005, he purged the chairman of the House Ethics Committee for daring to admonish DeLay. And after Rep. William Jefferson's offices were raided by the FBI last spring, it was Hastert who lodged the strongest protest on the Louisiana Democrat's behalf.

Bipartisanship! Ain't it grand?

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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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The tea party Republican candidate who defeated Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar (R) after six terms in Tuesday's GOP primary says that his definition of "compromise" means that Democrats will have to come around the the right's way of thinking.

"What I've said about compromise and bipartisanship is I hope to build a conservative majority in the United States Senate so that bipartisanship becomes Democrats joining Republicans to roll back the size of government, reduce the bureaucracy, lower taxes and get American moving again," Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock told CNN on Tuesday.

"What I hear you say is you are not going to compromise," CNN host Soledad O'Brien observed. "In fact, the only compromise you'll do is really getting other people on the other side of the aisle to your side of the aisle, which I guess is the definition against compromise."

"It is the definition of political effectiveness," Mourdock replied.

"Political effectiveness, you're saying, is not possible with compromise," O'Brien noted. "Some people would say political effectiveness in the Senate requires compromise. There are many issues that cannot be done if you do not get bipartisan support. You're not going to work towards bipartisan support?"

"The fact is you never compromise on principles," Mourdock explained. "If people on the far left have a principle they want to stand by, they should never compromise. Those of us on the right should not either. Compromise may come in the finer details of a plan or a budget."

"We are at the point where one side of the other will win this argument," he added. "One side or the other will dominate."

(h/t: National Journal)

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It's hard to say what is behind Sen. Olympia Snowe's decision not to seek reelection in 2012, but MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell allowed the Senator to come on her show and play the 'both sides" are responsible for the partisan divide in Washington D.C. and pretend like it's not her party that hasn't moved the Overton window to the right so far that there's no place for someone like the Republican Snowe used to be in their party any more.

Steve Benen weighed in on Snowe's unexpected retirement announcement and just how far she's shifted to the right in recent years -- Snowe's stunning surprise:

When prominent members of Congress are considering retirement, there's nearly always some kind of hint in advance of the announcement. Maybe they stop raising money; perhaps they're slow to put a campaign organization together; maybe key staffers are seen moving to new jobs elsewhere; something.

But with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R) of Maine, all of the evidence pointed in the other direction. Not only were there no hints about a pending departure, the Republican senator gave every indication of seeking another term, even moving considerably to the right.

It's what made Snowe's retirement announcement late yesterday such a stunning surprise.

"As I enter a new chapter, I see a vital need for the political center in order for our democracy to flourish and to find solutions that unite rather than divide us. It is time for change in the way we govern, and I believe there are unique opportunities to build support for that change from outside the United States Senate. I intend to help give voice to my fellow citizens who believe, as I do, that we must return to an era of civility in government driven by a common purpose to fulfill the promise that is unique to America."

There are a few angles to a story like this. First, in terms of the electoral consequences, Snowe's announcement is a brutal setback for Republican plans to retake the Senate majority next year. As Steve Kornacki explained, "With Snowe in it, Democrats had virtually no chance of winning the Maine Senate race this year. Now they are likely to do so, given the state's partisan bent."

Second, I can't help but wonder how much Snowe regrets her shift to the right, taking positions she never would have adopted earlier in her career.

Consider just the last few months. In October, she partnered with a right-wing Alabama senator to push a plan to make the legislative process even more difficult. A week earlier, she demanded the administration act with “urgency” to address the jobs crisis, only to filibuster a popular jobs bill a day later. The week before that, Snowe prioritized tax cuts for millionaires over job creation. Shortly before that, Snowe tried to argue that government spending is “clearly … the problem” when it comes to the nation’s finances, which is a popular line among conservatives, despite being completely wrong. Read on...

Regardless of the fact that Snowe contributed to making the partisan divide on Washington worse and that she was happy to cater to the leadership of Mitch McConnell who's primary goal is to make sure President Obama is a "one term president" Mitchell was more than happy to allow Snowe to have a pass here without any questioning about her shift to the right along with the rest of her party which has made bipartisanship next to impossible since the choices for "compromise" are somewhere between far right extremism and center-right corporatism.

Transcript below the fold.

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This Wednesday on PBS, we got treated to another dose of David Brooks and his fetishism for “centrism,” with Charlie Rose leading the way, asking Brooks for “five big ideas, five big, bold ideas that you would like to see debated in the upcoming presidential election, which will have consequences for who we are.”

His answer is anything but surprising given the column he wrote earlier in the week, which has been panned from so many people out there, it's hard to keep count, but Politico gave it a shot and so did Gawker.

First out of the box: tax “reform”, which of course is nothing but Republican double-speak for lowering rates on the highest earners and making the tax code less progressive under the guise of “fairness” and pretending Republicans will ever close any of the loopholes for corporations, which they won't.

Brooks' second “big idea” is doing something to fix the costs of Medicare, which Brooks claims that no one knows how to do, and then immediately proceeds to tout Paul Ryan's “premium support” which is Republican double-speak for privatizing it. Naturally Rose didn't point out that we could do something to control the costs, like putting everyone on it instead of pushing the sickest and most expensive patients onto the tax payers while the insurance companies get to line their pockets off of the rest of us. That conversation isn't allowed in our corporate media though, so they moved on after Brooks lied about how privatizing Medicare was going to contain the costs instead of admitting that it would just push the costs onto seniors instead. Brooks also said we could “try some things that are in 'Obamacare' too,” but of course he didn't elaborate on what any of those things are.

Brilliant idea number three ... “family policy is essential.” To which even Charlie Rose had to ask, “What does that mean?” This is where Brooks blames income disparity and a lack of eduction on women having babies out of wedlock.

BROOKS: Right now, we have forty-odd percentage points of kids in this country born out of wedlock. The effects of that on average, not for every kid born out of wedlock, but for, on average, the effects of that are so powerful that it means thirty years from now inequality will be worse than it is right now. The achievement gap will be worse than it is right now. These effects are just huge and I don't care what we do with charter schools and all the other good stuff. You will not be able to counteract that effect of family breakdown. […]

It involves some conservative sounding ideas, getting people to get married before they have kids, just a social norm, some liberal policies. You've got to make men marriageable by giving them incomes, earned income tax credit, wage subsidies, or else no one's going to want to marry a guy if he has no income. And so that's a left/right thing, which I really think Obama should have done.

“Obama should have done.” I'm not quite sure how David Brooks thinks President Obama could have forced all of those people out there having premarital sex and having babies out of wedlock to get married first, but that statement just about made my jaw drop.

I guess Charlie Rose doesn't read Brooks' column, because he didn't bother to ask him about the fact that he was just citing the exact same statistics to praise the writings of Charles Murry, who as Charles Pierce pointed out this week, “has dismissed black people as fundamentally uneducable.”

I'll let Pierce take it from here with his commentary on Brooks and his column where the same topic of out of wedlock babies came up — Our Mr. Brooks Finds Another Very Important Thinker:

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Here we go again with Karl Rove's favorite dance partner, David Gregory, carrying water for Republicans and their obstruction in the Senate. On this Sunday's Meet the Press, while badgering Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid about why President Obama and the Democrats haven't done more to work with Republicans, Gregory repeats one Republican talking point after another to try to deflect just how impossible the GOP has been to work with.

We've seen this act before from Gregory. Here he was with the same routine on Morning Joe last October -- David Gregory: McConnell's Claim That 'Obama Got Everything He Wanted and it Didn't Work' Resonated With Public.

I'm not going to rehash all of the points made in that post, but they're all applicable here. Gregory is still pretending that the Democrats, to a fault haven't tried to govern in a bipartisan manner and if they just were a little nicer to the Republicans or gave just an inch more, the GOP would start working with them, which he knows full well is never going to happen.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Who needs Fox News when we've got PBS out there spewing the same type of nonsense we hear nonstop there, and allowing David Brooks to come on the air opining the failure of the so-called "Super Committee" to reach a deal and praising Mitt Romney for embracing the advice of Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin, who were urging the committee to partially privatize Medicare. But that's exactly what we got this Monday on The Charlie Rose Show.

Think Progress laid out why this is a terrible idea in their post here -- GOP Super Committee Co-Chair: Lawmakers Failed Because Democrats Refused To Privatize Medicare:

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) faults the Democrats’ refusal to accept partial Medicare privatization for the super committee’s inability to come up with a bipartisan plan to lower spending in today’s Wall Street Journal. He writes, “Democrats on the committee made it clear that the new spending called for in the president’s health law was off the table” and pretends that the spending in the Affordable Care Act added to the deficit (it actually reduces it). “Republicans offered to negotiate a plan on the other two health-care entitlements—Medicare and Medicaid—based upon the reforms included in the budget the House passed earlier this year,” he continues and lays out the premium support proposal offered by Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici: [...]

Hensarling doesn’t mention that the Rivlin-Domenici premium-support proposal doesn’t so much lower national health care spending as it shifts it to the beneficiary. The plan reduces the federal contribution to Medicare by capping costs for each beneficiary and offering premium support credits that won’t keep up with actual health care spending. The federal government spends less, but seniors will pay more out of pocket for health care benefits every year. The proposal also breaks up the market clout of traditional Medicare and rather than ratcheting up some of efficiencies and payment reforms in the Affordable Care Act, it sets the nation on an untested path of private competition — leaving seniors vulnerable to the manipulations of for-profit health insurers.

Rough transcript of Brooks' hackery below the fold.

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Here we go again with the Republican's meme of the week being repeated, this time by Wall Street apologist billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg, harping about the failure of the so-called "Super Committee." I guess he manged to tear himself away for a while from hyping overblown terrorist threats and having the police beat up the dirty hippies at Occupy Wall Street long enough to do this interview with John King.

So good of CNN to have Bloomberg come on to play the happy "centrist," touting the failed Simpson-Bowles deficit commission as some "reasonable" solution for everyone to have a little shared sacrifice. He did call for the end to the Bush tax cuts that were extended during the Obama administration, but never did the words income disparity leave his lips during this entire interview as far as what ails our country right now. He also continues like the rest of them in our corporate media to pretend that both sides are being equally inflexible rather than any admission that both parties have moved way to far to the right, with one falling completely off the cliff with protecting their tax cuts for the rich.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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Here we go with more fearmongering over whether the super committee manages to come to some sort of agreement or not. A couple of weeks ago we had Chris Cillizza, filling in for Chuck Todd on MSNBC's Daily Rundown, allowing the senior Sununu to spread lies about Social Security and Medicare.

This week, he brings in Sununu's son and conserva-Dem Blanche Lincoln to espouse the values of bipartisan negotiations so we can have members of Congress make cuts to our social safety nets in return for “tax reform.” Of course by “reform”, they're taking about lowing rates for corporations and the wealthiest among us and supposedly closing some loopholes or tax deductions, which I'll believe will happen when hell freezes over since Republicans have done nothing but obstruct any effort to do so in the past, no matter what the supposed trade-off.

CILIZZA: Well, this is a happy topic to bring you two in on, but let's start with, we are now seven days away from a deal. The super committee is keeping their cards relatively close to the vest. You guys have been in intense negotiations when you know the American public wants something, but you just can't make your colleagues do it. What's the attitude in the Democratic caucus right now, Sen. Lincoln if you had to guess?

So Cillizza thinks Lincoln knows something about Congressional negotiations and being on the side of what the public wants? Really? I hate to break it to him, but Blanche Lincoln was not on the side of public opinion during the health care debate. She was on the side of the insurance companies before finally starting to flip-flop after enough public pressure was put on her to do so.

Lincoln replied by fearmongering over the super committee not reaching an agreement supposedly interfering with holiday spending that our own RJ Eskow wrote about here – If the Super Committee Doesn't Cut Your Medicare, Santa Claus Will Die!.

LINCOLN: Well, I would think it's frustration, just like the rest of the country. I mean, people understand on capitol hill how big these issues are and how important it is. One of the things I hope that they'll understand is that the timing of this is crucial too. I mean, you're going to hit Black Friday and cyber-Monday about the same time you come out with the possibility of nothing coming out of the super committee and what does that do to consumer confidence?

Apparently the producers of Chuck Todd's show and Chris Cillizza think their audience has short memories and have no clue about Blanche Lincoln and who's interests she was looking out for during her time in the Senate. Shameful. Here are a few posts I'd recommend any of them read before they bring her back on again, not that it matters. I'm pretty sure they know perfectly well how dishonest they're being to the viewers.

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