Gerald Ford

The folks at MSNBC as well as parent NBC should sit up and take notice of something Joe Scarborough said on Monday's "Morning Joe."

"There are not enough people that are either Republican in the mainstream media or talk to people on the telephone at least one a month...who actually understand what the Republican Party is" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A minor historical footnote, perhaps, but arguably an interesting one . . .

A man whose Watergate reporting made his career and led to Richard Nixon's downfall has declared that Pres. Gerald Ford did the right thing in pardoning Nixon.  

Carl Bernstein made the--to me at least--surprising statement on today's Morning Joe, in the course of a discussion of Jeff Greenfield's new book about various what-ifs in history.

View video after the jump.

On Monday’s Countdown show, MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Alter – also of Newsweek – claimed that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is, in fact, a "moderate" who has such "great intellect" that he makes conservative Justice Antonin Scalia "look like a pygmy." Alter: "Justice Stevens is the great intellect on the court in our generation. He makes, say, Scalia look like a pygmy, intellectually, despite all of his fireworks that Scalia gives off. Stevens was an appointee of Republican Gerald Ford. But he`s always been a moderate who has tried to interpret the law, which is his job, in an intellectually honest way."

Alter also charged that the Republican majority on the Supreme Court constitutes a "hypocrisy court" as he claimed that Republican justices support judicial activism. Alter: "For a generation, they`ve been saying they don`t want to legislate from the bench. Now, they are the hypocrisy court. The majority, the Republican majority is the hypocrisy court. They`ve completely turned on a dime. They now believe in judicial activism. So pretty much anything that they would try to say, any argument they would try to have against an Obama nominee would be intellectually empty, because the argument that they`ve been making against liberals is completely bankrupt after these recent very activist, conservative decisions."

While it is an illustration of just how far left Alter’s views are if he sees Justice Stevens as a moderate, it is noteworthy that last November, as he recounted that conservatives like former Congressman Bob Barr, Grover Norquist and David Keene are "principled conservatives" as they disagreed with Rudy Giuliani on the trying of terrorist suspects in civilian courts, Alter admitted to disagreeing with conservatives 98 percent of the time. Alter: "But, you know, they are principled conservative – even if you disagree, as I do with, you know, 98 percent of what they stand for."

On Thursday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann disputed Vice President Cheney’s recent contention that history would likely judge the Bush administration more favorably than current approval rating numbers would suggest, as the MSNBC host distorted the results of a July 2007 Rasmussen poll to discredit Cheney’s claim that views of President Ford have softened up over the 30 years since he pardoned Richard Nixon. Olbermann, who has a history of using distortion to attack conservatives, declared that Ford was the "twelfth most unpopular President of all time, even though he was only in office for 30 months."

During the show's regular "Bushed!" segment, after imitating Cheney’s voice while quoting the Vice President, Olbermann asserted:

On Tuesday’s "Good Morning America," reporter Jake Tapper used the story that Rudy Giuliani’s daughter had joined a pro-Barack Obama Facebook group as a segue to recount the travails of other presidential children. Somehow, his list of wayward youths included only the offspring of famous Republican politicians, while ignoring Democratic embarrassments, such as the recent drug arrest of Al Gore III.

Additionally, GMA anchor Diane Sawyer closed the segment by discussing parent/child relationships with guest host George Stephanopoulos. Sawyer mentioned how she fought with her father, a Republican judge, over politics:

Diane Sawyer: "...I remember what a hard time I gave my father about politics."

George Stephanopoulos: "About his votes?"

Sawyer: "Yeah."