Appearing in the 3 p.m. ET hour of MSNBC Live on Tuesday, Hardball host Chris Matthews revealed how terrified he is at the prospect of Texas Senator Ted Cruz becoming president: “...Cruz is scarier than Trump and that will be a frightening prospect to realize....if we weren't talking about Trump, we’d be talking about the horror of this country possibly being led by Cruz.”

In the past, Joe Scarborough hasn't exactly hidden his disdain for Marco Rubio, saying he reminds him of an eager student government candidate and questioning his integrity. But things have now escalated to open warfare between the two. 

Scarborough, responding to an ad in which Rubio speaks of feeling "out of place in our own country," tweeted an attack accusing Rubio of playing a "crass, offensive, nativist" [read xenophobic/borderline racist] card. Rubio has fired back, putting out a fundraising message in which he slams Scarborough as an "elitist."

Though Steve Benen, who's also the primary blogger for the MSNBC program's website, is a true-blue liberal, he thinks highly of the foreign-policy chops of some recent Republicans. In a Thursday post, Benen wrote that GOPers such as Richard Lugar and Brent Scowcroft were “learned” and “approached international affairs with [a] degree of maturity.”

That was then; this is now. Benen touched on, among other things, Ted Cruz’s pledge to “carpet bomb” ISIS and Marco Rubio’s remark that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “not a mistake” to build a case that today’s Republican party “approaches foreign policy…with all the maturity of a Saturday-morning cartoon…The national GOP candidates are speaking to (and for) a party that has no patience for substantive details, historical lessons, nuance, or diplomacy.”

Talking to NPR’s Steve Inskeep on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, fill-in anchor Luke Russert congratulated the Morning Edition host for teeing up the President to slam Republican critics as racist in a recent interview. A clip played of Inskeep asking the President: “Do you feel over seven years that you’ve come to understand why it is that some ordinary people in America believe or fear that you are trying to change the country in some way that they cannot accept?”

Appearing exclusively on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd repeatedly pressed Speaker Paul Ryan to denounce conservative radio talk show hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin over their criticism of the recently-passed omnibus bill and Todd demanded to know how he’ll work with President Obama to “lay the groundwork” to end political polarization. Todd asked, of the talk show hosts, whether their “rhetoric is inappropriate” or “[o]ut of line?”