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Chris Matthews and his panel name Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, the birthers and their ilk and white tribalism as the plague of 2009. The right wingers will of course take this as proof that Matthews is part of that 'librul' media and complain about the tingle up his leg while forgetting about Mitten's chin and Grandpa Fred's Aqua Velva.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. And more of our look back at this year. Next category, we're calling it a "Plague on All Our Houses." First, swine flu – now, that was a big, big deal this year. The birthers, another kind of plague, the people who pushed the idea that Barack Obama was not born in America. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk -– the nutty talk went off the rails this past summer. Here is Beck:

GLENN BECK: This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don't know what it is.

BECK: This guy is, I believe, a racist.

MATTHEWS: And our last plague, those reality TV wannabes. The balloon family and those White House gate crashers. Howard, another rich list. By the way, Glenn Beck, white people. What's that supposed to mean?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, it's hard not to name him the "Plague of the Year." And not for ideological reasons. Because I think the name calling, the shameless name calling, and stirring up of the worst in our society is something that should be condemned. It was a year ago, almost a year ago, that we were all out there on the mall, when Barack Obama was sworn in as President, one of the great moments in American history, no matter what your politics are, no matter who you are, where you come from, and to sort of drag all that through the mud I think is a plague.

MATTHEWS: Yes, bring back tribalism.

FINEMAN: Yeah, exactly.

KATTY KAY: I would say the birthers, and I think because it's insidious...

MATTHEWS: Same deal, by the way.

KAY: I think it’s a similar deal, and with the birthers, it's getting at this idea that Americans somehow don't like anything that's foreign, that anything that's foreign is suspicious. And there's no evidence of this. And the way that people like Sarah Palin have said this is an issue without actually coming out straight and saying I think he wasn't born in America. There’s a very mean-spiritedness about the birthers, I find, worrying about...

MATTHEWS: I think it’s tribalism, white tribalism.

NORAH O’DONNELL: It is, and it's an effort to delegitimize the President in some way, to offer an ad hominem attack in many ways...

KAY: Without even straight-up attacking.

O’DONNELL: ...suggesting he’s not credible, he’s not American. And it’s sort of a way to – it’s racist in many ways to do it.

MATTHEWS: John, you've got a book coming out, a big one, coming out very early this year, right at the new year time. And you’re going to be on here to talk about it. Was this something that was simmering, this sort of tribalistic resentment of Barack Obama being what he is?

JOHN HEILEMANN: Yeah, it’s funny, you know, people forget that this happened at the end of general election in 2008 where John McCain and Sarah Palin were out at their rallies and you started to see, when she started to talk about how he was palling around with terrorists, you started to see the early incipient kind of signs of what became the birther movement, where you’d have people standing up calling him a socialist, calling him a communist...

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

HEILEMANN: ...calling him an Arab. You know, that stuff was out there, and you only saw it at the very, very end. And by that point, Obama was so far ahead that people kind of ignored it. But it was there and they activated it.

MATTHEWS: And did you hear that Palin was saying that later on, more recently, she wished they’d done more of that Reverend Wright stuff, more of that ethnic stuff, that racial stuff? She wanted to push that.

HEILEMANN: She was very unhappy about going after Reverend Wright.

MATTHEWS: To John McCain’s lasting credit he refused to play the racial card, which is always easy to play in this country, as we’ve seen.

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What can I say to add to what the panel on the Chris Matthews show had to say about health care reform other than thanks for recommending a kick on the chin Chris? Wall Street doesn't like it so let's carry water for the investment class that's making money from the insurance industry denying care to average Americans, and let's use the fear of the economy getting worse that Wall Street helped to wreck as a reason to feign concern over whether anything gets done or not. And while we're at it, let's also tell the "left wing" that they need to "take it on the chin" so we don't upset the Wall Street bankers.

About the only good thing I saw coming out of this segment was the admission that a whole lot of what's driving the health care debate in this country is not about what's good for Americans, but what's good for Wall Street. Until that changes, nothing is going to improve with our health insurance or health care delivery system in the United States.

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Even after showing a poll which shows that the majority of the opposition to the President is comprised of Southern, white, older men and white Evangelicals, and after playing some of the over the top attacks on President Obama by the likes of Zell Miller and Rush Limbaugh, Matthews still chooses to frame the first part of his panel debate this way.

Matthews: Did the Sotomayor nomination, the combinization of all those discussions about the wise Latina woman and how she'd be a Justice, did the discussion by the President where he talked about the sergeant in Cambridge acting stupidly, did he open the door to this sort of ethnic attack on him? An attack on his very legitimacy?

What astounded me about the panel's response is not one of them bothered to mention that maybe it is their job to beat back at this nonsense. While acknowledging the right wing lunacy, they all seemed to feign helplessness with what to do about it. None of them stated clearly that the Sotomayor nomination or the Gates dust up nonsense was not a legitimate reason for the right wing to be going ballistic at these town halls, and with the over the top racial attacks on President Obama.

John Heilemann is dead wrong. The President did not give them a "permission slip" to act this way, and it is in no way "unintentional" that they wanted to open the door to racial attacks. They were already looking for any excuse to do it and whether it was Sotomayor or Gates or whatever, this would have happened sooner or later because the haters simply will never accept that a black man was elected President in the United States.

This is the Sarah Palin nut jobs gone wild, morphed into the tea baggers movement, and it is about hate, pure and simple. End of story. And unfortunately I don't think these people are going to stop until someone ends up dead, and even that may not stop them.

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Chris Matthews "big question" for this week is who's winning the debate over whether to close Gitmo or not. We get treated to this bit of mumbo jumbo by New York Magazine's John Heilemann in response.

Heilemann: Well on the question though, on the substance of it, the administration's winning the argument because they're right and it's crazy to think that we couldn't integrate it, that we couldn't have these prisoners brought on shore with no risk to the American society.

On the politics conservatives are winning this argument because people are afraid of what the implications would be and I don't think the NIMBY argument, not in my back yard argument, as a political matter is still winning the day right now.

I think Heilemann misspoke since he contradicted himself in the same sentence. It was the end of the show and possibly Matthews wasn't listening to him that carefully since he did't catch the slip, but he said he agrees with him and I would guess it was with what he was trying to say, which is that the Cheney's of the world and the GOP are winning the game of keeping Americans terrified.

That said here's my beef with this. How do you say that the President is correct and that it's "crazy" not to think terrorist suspects could be brought to the U.S. and in the next sentence say the ones who are spreading the crazy with trying to scare the hell out of everyone are winning the argument without qualifying why?

If the NIMBY argument is still winning the day it's because not enough of you "journalists" are calling it out for being "crazy" and explaining to the public how the GOP is fear mongering for political gain. Maybe when Chris Matthews ever bothers to take this seriously as a matter of criminal justice instead of political gain and the silliness of who's "winning and losing" we'll have some better dialog on the topic from one of his shows. I'm not holding my breath for any hope of that happening soon.

In the mean time we are subjected to a give me your opinion in thirty seconds or less round table of nonsense on a topic that deserves a much more serious and lengthy debate.

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While I think it is premature to write an obituary for the Republican Party, it's hard not to watch this clip and not come to the conclusion that the party is in critical condition.

What is a consensus amongst the talking heads is that the GOP is lost today: no leader, no clear idea of what values to champion, no clear idea if it should be centrist or move even further to the right. Of all the things that the Bush administration destroyed in their term of office, their own party is probably the most surprising.

And who is it poised to rise again like Lazarus to prove the divine right of the GOP, according to those Beltway insiders? Newt "Love means never having to say I'm sorry to my other wives" Gingrich. Even Chris Matthews cannot hold back his patented guffaw at the thought.

Ultimately, the group agrees that it remains to be seen whose idea will resonate with the general public, but it appears that no one currently vying for the top role has been able to offer an idea that we haven't seen for the last 30 years. So have I got this straight? No obvious leader, rudderless and no new ideas?

Awwww....couldn't happen to a more deserving party.