Though she leavened it with considerable levity, there's no escaping the bottom line: Mika Brzezinski sees Pat Buchanan as a nut. An affable one, to be sure. Even one with interesting things to say. But at heart, a nut. A "crazy uncle" fit for the same crate of cracked pots as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The prelude was Mika's reading of an excerpt from a brilliant essay by Charles Krauthammer in today's WaPo. Writing of Obama's recent attempt to definitively hurl Rev. Wright under the Greyhound, Krauthammer observed:

It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Obama.

That prompted this exchange.

View video here.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Reverend Wright brought this man to God. He married he and his wife. He baptized the children. It cuts both ways. Of course you can say how could you allow this guy to to do that when you knew what he said from the pulpit? But also, we all have our crazy relatives. Our sort of different type of friends.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Really?

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, we do. I don't know about you.

BRZEZINSKI: Well, I'm just thinking Pat Buchanan.

SCARBOROUGH: What, Pat? You calling Pat crazy?

BRZEZINSKI: No! He's like a crazy uncle.

SCARBOROUGH: And the thing is we love him so we don't separate ourselves from him.

BRZEZINSKI: No we don't. We're not denouncing you.

SCARBOROUGH: There's nothing crazy about Pat Buchanan. You know, Pat, I gues that doesn't surprise you because you don't hang out at the Trilateral Commission meetings. Listen to Brzezinski sounding like the rest of the Washington elites attacking my main man, Pat Buchanan.

BRZEZINSKI: I love Pat.

SCARBOROUGH: You just called him crazy.

BRZEZINSKI: I love crazy men.

PATRICK BUCHANAN: Pat is our resident nutball is what Mika was saying.

SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, our resident nutball that gets it right more than all the other blue-blooded elites in the media.

BRZEZINSKI: Everything you have to say, Pat, has value.

SCARBOROUGH: What does that mean?

BUCHANAN: I'm not sure how how to construct that. Some kind of value. Has redeeming social value as the Supreme Court said.

BRZEZINSKI: Exactly.

BUCHANAN: On pornography.

SCARBOROUGH: What was it that you told Rachel Maddow to cut out? What was that: Marxist dialectic?

BUCHANAN: Well, she sort of went into the Marxist dialectic. We were trying to get down to the returns from Pennsylvania.

BUCHANAN: Mika just tilts a little bit to the left there, Joe.

BRZEZINSKI: I tilt?

SCARBOROUGH: Okay, okay. You go way overboard. Like the Titanic. Boom.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, please. That's so not true.

SCARBOROUGH: Pat, let's talk about—you attacked Pat Buchanan!

BRZEZINSKI: I did not. I just said he was like our crazy uncle. And I love crazy men. What's wrong with that?

SCARBOROUGH: Stop calling him crazy. Attack on Pat is attack on all of us.

BRZEZINSKI: I love Pat.

SCARBOROUGH: Okay. Enough. Enough.

—Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net.