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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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Looks like Tommy Christopher at Mediaite figured out what we've been saying over here for a long time now... that David Gregory is a right wing tool who's constantly advocating for really bad Republican economic policies along with a bunch of his fellow Villagers in the media: David Gregory Tells Morning Joe That President Obama Must Gut Medicare To Succeed:

On a very special 2nd Quadrennial Barack Obama Day edition of Morning Joe, Meet The Press host David Gregory provided some more evidence against the mythical “liberal media bias” when he endorsed the emerging Beltway media consensus that in order to deal with debt and deficits, President Obama is going to have to gut Medicare. “He’s got to be able to convince his own party, but also to do something that, frankly, Americans don’t want done,” Gregory said of Medicare, “which is to have to give back some things.”

[...] what’s significant is that Gregory wasn’t offering merely pragmatic political advice, but actually endorsing the idea that the way to solve our fiscal problems involves cutting Medicare for beneficiaries.

Unfortunately for America, President Obama has already indicated a willingness to move in that direction, having already placed raising the Medicare eligibility age on the table. Raising the age will only shift those costs, at higher rates, and only partially away from the federal government. Those two extra years will either be paid for by the seniors themselves, who will be charged up to 3 times as much for health insurance on the individual market, or by the government in the form of Medicaid for those who can’t afford private insurance, or by private insurance companies.

What no one is talking about is that Medicare is a huge break for private insurers, who get to lay off their highest-risk patients onto the government. People with retiree group health insurance will be covered by their health insurance for those two extra years, at great expense to those companies. The amount of money they pay out in claims will far outstrip what they can take in in premiums, and the additional premiums will fall on those retirees’ employers.

The other problem is that, relatively speaking, 65 and 66 year-olds are bargains for Medicare, and eliminating them from the program would only succeed at making the overall pool of Medicare recipients older and sicker. If there was a way to eliminate the last 2 years of eligibility, you’d be on to something.

Gregory and his fellow beltway hacks Joe Scarborough and Tom Brokaw have been singing this tune for some time now as we've pointed out here over, and over, and over, and over and over again. And as Christopher rightfully noted out, there are ways to make Medicare solvent without turning it over to the private insurance market:

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He just can't stop himself. It's only been a few weeks since Tom Brokaw was on Meet the Press, pushing for cuts to Social Security and Medicare and here he is back again this Sunday, this time using an new NBC/WSJ poll on the public's expectations going into President Obama's second term to push for cutting them again.

Chuck Todd showed the audience some of the results from the poll and a word cloud showing the answer to the question "What would you tell Pres. Obama as he begins his second term?" and here's what that looked like:

And here's how Brokaw interpreted it:

BROKAW: Yes, and I was looking at those top three priorities for the American people and they all fit into his single most difficult task, it seems to me, both conceptually and specifically. In the next couple of years -- and he only has a couple of years, second terms are not four year terms -- you're running right up to the mid-term election, frankly -- I think that there's a desperate need for the country, going forward, to do something about tax reform and entitlements, sitting under the umbrella of fixing the economy and creating more jobs and stop the spending. That's going to be tough.

We've been giving people things for a long time. Now they're going to have to start reeling them in and fine tuning them and that's going to take an exceptional hand in the White House to pull that off. So that's a daunting task. You know, this is like the Saturday before Superbowl Sunday, everybody's talking about what's going to happen. Then the kickoff comes and unexpected events begin to roll out across the political landscape and that's what he has to adapt to David.

You know what's not "unexpected" Tom? That millionaire pundits like yourself are going to continue to push to gut our social safety nets because you don't want your taxes raised.

When I read that Americans believe we need to create jobs, fix the economy and stop the spending, the first things to come into my mind are stop outsourcing, quit with the race to the bottom on wages, quit busting unions and stop wasting money on our bloated military industrial complex. Somehow cutting Social Security benefits instead of raising the cap and cutting Medicare benefits by raising the eligibility age and forcing seniors into private insurance -- instead of addressing the real problems with our rising health care costs -- never made it onto my list. Imagine that.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting really tired of watching a bunch of extremely rich pundits sit around and tell the rest of us that there just hasn't been enough shared sacrifice from the working class, the elderly and the poor yet in order to solve our deficit problem. But that's exactly what the viewers are treated to day after day on MSNBC's three hour long Villager conventional wisdom regurgitation-fest called Morning Joe.

This Wednesday was no exception and immediately following the so-called "fiscal cliff" debacle coming to a conclusion, and the pundits on there didn't miss a beat with demands that President Obama had better get out there and use his bully pulpit to explain to the American people that we're all just going to have to be willing to give a little more in order for Republicans to not kill the hostage called the world's economy over this upcoming debt ceiling standoff.

This week we had Tom Brokaw going on Meet the Press and telling everyone that there's nothing wrong with raising the retirement age for Social Security and telling the lie that Americans are living longer. It's little wonder he'd have that view since he's not ever going to have to worry about his retirement security. And yes, rich people like himself are living to be older. Not so much for most of the rest of us.

If these guys want to go on the air and pontificate about how we ought to get a pound of flesh out of the working class, I think their salaries and net worth ought to be displayed right under their names in the chryon for the viewers. Maybe they'd feel a little differently about their opinions.

According to Forbes, Brokaw has an estimated net worth of $70 million.

And if the site Celebrity Networth is accurate, Scarborough's is $18 million and Brzezinski's is $8 million.

I'm not sure what some of the others who were on there this Wednesday like David Walker, Chuck Todd, Dan Senor, Richard Haas and Mark Halperin are worth, but I'm pretty sure they're all being paid really well and aren't worried about relying on Social Security for a comfortable retirement as well. But every one of them was joining in on carping about the deficit that none of them cared about it when Bush was blowing holes in it a mile wide with tax cuts and wars that weren't paid for. Deficits only matter when Democrats are elected as president.

And as far as Walker's claim that his group has gone around the country and gotten a positive response from ordinary people as they explained to them that they need to cut our social safety nets in order to balance the budget, well, that's not the experience our own Susie Madrak had when she went to one of them. As she noted:

You know what most of them wanted to do? Soak the rich -- and cut defense spending. [...]

I thought maybe it was just my table, but when they tabulated the results, it was pretty much the same throughout the crowded ballroom of several hundred attendees.

And of course absent from this conversation was any discussion about what to do to get Americans back to work. If we were at full employment and had some sort of decent economic growth in the United States, this deficit problem would take care of itself because we'd have more people paying taxes.

They also keep pretending like Social Security adds to our deficit. It doesn't and it has a surplus. And if they want to solve the problem with Medicare, we need to fix our health care costs over all. We pay way more than any other developed country with worse outcomes and putting seniors into the private insurance market doesn't solve the problem. It just shifts the costs around and drives them up. But you won't hear that discussion while they're pounding their fists about lowing the deficit.

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Tommy Christopher over at Mediaite caught this gem with NBC's Tom Brokaw playing the good little Republican water carrier and trying to blame the problem with our huge deficit on President Obama -- Tom Brokaw Says President Obama Must Answer For $1.1 Trillion Deficit ‘That Happened On His Watch’:

On Sunday morning’s Meet The Press, legendary newsman Tom Brokaw joined moderator David Gregory in evening out the “specifics” narrative that has dogged Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney by demanding that President Obama give more details about his plan to control the deficit and debt. Brokaw said that in a 2008 debate, then-Senator Obama “was saying, ‘Look, we’ve got a deficit of a half a trillion dollars. I’m going to get that under control.’ Well, this week that deficit is $1.1 trillion and it happened on his watch. He’s going to have to answer to that.”

By the time President Obama took office, however, he was handed a $1.017 trillion deficit by President George W. Bush. [...]

The half-trillion dollar deficit that President Obama was referring to, however, was for the fiscal year ending in September of 2007. The deficit for FY 2008 was $1,017,071. That still leaves President Obama’s promise to “get that under control” arguably unfulfilled, but also dramatically alters the terrain of that argument.

I would add to that, what Brokaw is also completely ignoring is just whose policies have added to the deficit, and as this chart displays, you can place the bulk of that squarely in Bush's lap as well -- Adding to the deficit: Bush vs. Obama.

Transcript below the fold.

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Shorter Joe Scarborough from this Wednesday's Morning Joe: the beatings will continue until morale improves, or how dare you point out facts about how Republicans treat unions because you're going to hurt their tender feelings, and then they'll have to hurt you some more.

Scarborough really is just a snide, mean S.O.B. because there's no way in hell he's stupid enough not to realize that what he's asking here is, as Harry Reid might put it, a clown question bro. To their credit the Teamsters' James Hoffa and the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka were way too polite to Scarborough or for that matter, any of the rest of them on the panel that morning, in response to their ridiculous questions. After poking both of them about the Democrats' extremely stupid decision to hold their convention in an anti-union state, which it's too late to change now, here's how Scarborough started things out:

SCARBOROUGH: What can unions do? What can Republicans do to start moving towards the time where the support is a bit more diversified? [...]

HOFFA: Well the problem in the Republican party, they veered to the right. I mean did you see their platform? National right to work. This was the most shrill convention last week against unions, you know, pounding their chest on how they beat up workers, you know, how they did this and how they took away collective bargaining rights. They thought that was a positive.

It was so negative that it... all it does is turn people off. This party is not reaching out. They can't reach out, especially when they're talking about national right to work, getting rid of project labor agreements. They're just going far and far to the right. They're like the John Birch Society, like in 1964. They're just going off the edge. And you know...

SCARBOROUGH: I will tell you what. I asked you how the two sides can come together. Boy, that kind of talk really helps a lot. I feel like embracing you right now.

HOFFA: You've gotta' reach out babe and nobody's reaching out. There's nobody there and that's the problem and if you hear what they're talking about in their themes, it's just unbelievably, right-wing, anti-labor.

Which put an end to Scarborough's feigned indignation, but led to such inane questions as Tom Brokaw asking them why any of the white guys in their unions vote for Republicans; Mike Barnicle asking why Republican politicians beating up on unions makes them popular. Followed by Al Hunt asking them why they're not supportive of Romney because he claims he'll be tougher on trade with China.

If any of these men were actually reporters and not overpaid pundits, they would not need to be asking the union leaders these questions. If they want to know how Republicans can get away with pulling the wool over workers' eyes to get them to vote against their own economic interests, all they've got to do is go take a look in the mirror. The media has been happy to help Republicans trash and demonize unions for a long, long time now, and they're going to sit there and pretend they're not fully aware of what attitudes and what policies have led to their decline.

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David Broder might be gone, but I think after this week, between his performance on Morning Joe playing the false equivalency game and now his excusing of Paul Ryan's lies in an extremely lame rebuttal to Newt Gingrich and Carly Fiorina's hackery on this Sunday's Meet the Press -- we can rightfully crown Tom Brokaw the new king of High Broderism.

Or at least the king for this week. There are too many others out there lined up to regularly take his place among the beltway Villagers in the media. Apparently lying your ass off for an entire speech to the point where everyone knows your hair's on fire whether they want to admit it or not is now "overreaching."

I wish Brokaw's hackery was the worst thing about this steaming pile of poo on Meet the Press this week, but sadly it was not. The entire show was just a tragedy and not a single liberal on the panel to counter wingnuts. Just blathering Villagers in the form of Gregory, Brokaw, Thomas Friedman and Doris Kearns Goodwin who all did their part to just muddy the waters.

Transcript below the fold.

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Steve Benen caught this tidbit from Morning Joe this Tuesday where Tom Brokaw was asking Mitt Romney what he's going to do about the increasing number of people falling out of the middle class and into poverty and the increased number of Americans relying on food stamps.

ROMNEY: Well, I want to make sure we have a safety net to care for those that are poor, but I want to get those who are poor into the middle class.

My ambition is to make sure that we start creating jobs again in this country and that we have rising median incomes, as opposed to the 10% decline we’ve seen in the last four years.

To get people back into work, get higher incomes, and let people have a middle-income life standard they had in the past. That’s the whole effort that I’m involved in.

Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.

Steve pointed out how fundamentally dishonest what Romney said here is since he's blaming President Obama for falling wages that occurred under the Bush administration and wondered what universe Romney is living in if he actually believes that someone who falls into poverty is still middle class, and he added this:

No wonder Romney thinks he, despite having a quarter-billion in the bank, is part of the middle class — this guy is so far out of touch, he no longer even understands what middle class even means.

That's our Mittens. Just an everyday man of the people don't you know.

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I don't know if anyone else is as sick of the Tom Brokaw/Chris Matthews consecutive book tours that we've got going on at MSNBC along with a couple of other networks, but this bit from Tuesday's Morning Joe where Brokaw was pushing his book along with some Villager conventional wisdom about what needs to be done to cure our country's ails left me feeling even more disgusted than I was with him after his appearance on Meet the Press this past Sunday.

The amount of cognitive dissonance necessary for either Tom Brokaw to make these statements in the first place, or the viewers that he thinks should be buying into his clap-trap here is really quite astounding.

After being asked by Willie Geist about American's “incredible levels of cynicism in government” and our Congress' nine percent approval level rating, and how some faith is potentially restored in our government, Brokaw responds this way.

BROKAW: Well again, it really requires the citizenry from the ground up to get involved in reclaiming their government. I've used this almost everywhere I go as an example. However you feel about the tea party, they got angry. Then they got organized. Then they got to Washington and they stayed disciplined and they were having an affect, out of proportion to their numbers, frankly, in the Republican debate.

But that's a demonstration of organization and power. And the other things is that I think both parties have to look at the enormous impact of big money on politics. K Street and the lobbyists and they're in there all day, every day.

Brokaw is apparently either completely detached from the reality, or just doesn't mind lying to the viewers since he's willing to ignore the fact that the “tea party” AstroTurf movement has been organized and co-opted by... lobbyists. Dick Armey... lobbyist. Matt Kibbe... lobbyist. Tim Phillips... lobbyist. And there are a lot more there where I could go on and on with who's pumping money into this “tea party”, another of which is one we've covered here extensively, the Koch brothers.

If Tom Brokaw honestly thinks that lobbyists have too much influence on our government, then the last thing he should be doing is trying to paint the “tea party” as grass roots and a cure for getting the influence of money out of politics.

After poo-pooing agriculture subsidies as one of the problems we have with lobbying groups having too much influence, which I do not disagree with by the way, Brokaw went on to champion our government having more “public/private partnerships” and used examples such as privatizing our schools, roads and water districts.

So Brokaw thinks we need to get rid of the influence of lobbyists in our government, but doesn't seem to mind so much the commons and institutions that should belong to the taxpayers being sold off to private industry so they can make a profit off of them.

This was followed by him talking to billionaire Mort Zuckerman who was touting his usual lines about how Washington is broken and complaints that there's not enough upward mobility in the United States any more, of course ignoring the fact that trickle-down economics, a race to the bottom on wages and labor protections due to globalization, lack of regulation of the financial industry among a host of other issues are what brought us to where we are now.

Nothing like MSNBC getting the opinion of one of the “little guys” like Zuckerman to let everyone know what the opinion of the one percent is so they can have a “fair and balanced” discussion on Morning Joe. So much for that "liberal" MSNBC. A lot of MSNBC's programming is really horrid but if there was ever one show anyone could consider pre-packaged for Fox and ready to move directly over there, Morning Joe definitely qualifies.

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Tom Brokaw is apparently very confused on the issue of “shared sacrifice” and who has and has not already been sacrificing in our society. On this Sunday's Meet the Press, while discussing a recent AARP ad where the group basically stated that the politicians had better keep their hands off of Social Security and Medicare, Brokaw called the ad selfish and an example of "I got mine, to heck with the rest of you." Brokaw followed that with a lot of hand wringing about what tough times we're all in for in America and how we need to be ready to “make some hard calls.”

It seems those “hard calls” include means testing Social Security, which is a terrible idea because it turns it into a welfare program that would be much easier to destroy. And nowhere in the conversation did raising taxes on the rich, raising the cap on payroll taxes, our terrible trade laws that encourage a race to the bottom on wages, the destruction of the labor movement or the refusal to regulate the financial industries come up as a solution to making sure we can keep our social safety nets in place and that we don't have senior citizens or anyone else for that matter living in poverty.

Color me not shocked since our Villagers in the corporate media still aren't over their fetish with austerity measures, regardless of where the majority of public opinion is at right now where people are fed up with the income disparity and the poor and middle class being the only ones asked to make some kind of “shared sacrifice.”

Transcript below the fold.

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