After This "McLaughlin Group" Outburst

Lawrence O'Donnell became hard to find on the teevee machine for awhile.

Then time passed and seasons changed and MSNBC hired him and eventually gave him his own shot.  Which was a very fine thing.

However while he can still bring the heat, as I pointed out in this post from April of this year, Mr. O'Donnell has also shown that he has learned the art of rolling over and playing snuggle puppy when members of the Beltway's Elite Media Club -- people who could actually reach out and smack him back into relative obscurity -- cross his path:

...

Back when the Big Iraqi War Lie was the hot, new fraud on the block, those who  went along with the program reaped all the worldly rewards the Beltway Whorehouse had to offer.

Those who didn't go along, got marginalized or pulverized.

Sure, the droolbuckets who fell into lockstep behind President Cheney were, in the end, shown to be completely and criminally wrong, and the dirty fucking hippies were completely vindicated:  this is an unreservedly good thing and hopefully the reputations of America's warpimps will one day dangle from the righteous gibbet of history. But it is also true that here-and-now there is no court of appeal or office of professional rectification to whom the perverse judgement of our Beltway Overlords can be appealed; that, for the most part, the scum kept their spoils and even traded up and, for the most part,  those who were driven out of the public arena out have been kept out.

And this has been a powerful lesson.

Here is MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell vivisecting lying Teabagger goof Joe Walsh

Here is MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell taking on lying Birther goof Orly Taitz 

Here is MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell pulling apart Ron Paul's happy Libertarian horseshit and showing us the ooey-gooey racist center:

So it's not Mr. O'Donnell doesn't know how to construct an argument against a purveyor of bullshit or how to mount that argument with mucho gusto.

And yet, when the High Priest of the Church of Axiomatic Centrism sits down across from him to pimp his latest book, on go the kid gloves and out comes the cocoa butter... 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Which is not to pick on Mr. O'Donnell, who usually does a fine job, but rather to point out that a lot of people on teevee lie about a lot of things.

When the lies are about birth certificates, or civil rights or the budget or about ACORN, there is a phalanx of people with microphones and cameras on hand who take on the liars and push back hard.

But when it comes to the Big Lie of Centrism, everyone except the rag-taggiest of dirty fucking hippies -- even people who are normally on the side of the angels -- fall ominously silent in the face of a powerful, invisible force-field of professional deference leaving liars like Tom Friedman  to spout their destructive idiocy unmolested.

So my question is, which Lawrence O'Donnell will show up when he sits across the table from bomb-throwing grifter, serial liar and fellow NBC employee Newt Gingrich tomorrow on "Meet the Press"?

Dr. Jekyll or Uncle Fluffy?