When four members of the media, only one of them decidely right-leaning, agree on something, viewers should pay heed: blaming conservative talk show hosts whenever someone goes on an unprovoked shooting spree is wrong.

Such was the unanimous conclusion reached on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" when host Howard Kurtz and his guests -- Mark Halperin of Time magazine, Ana Marie Cox of Air America Radio, and Jim Geraghty of National Review -- got together to discuss the predictable reaction to Wednesday's killings at the Holocaust Museum Memorial.

Most surprisingly, even the uber-liberal Cox concurred:

I do think it is irresponsible to make that a very like hard connection. I have to totally disagree with Rachel [Maddow] and Keith [Olbermann] on this. I think that that was going a little bit too far to compare him to Rush Limbaugh.

Imagine that. What follows is an embedded video of this surprising segment (relevant section at 12:00) along with a partial transcript:

MSNBC prides itself as being the place for politics, the seemingly clever marketing slogan could be used to describe the network as the place where hosts try to use dirty humor about important political events.

David Shuster, filling in for MSNBC loose-cannon Keith Olbermann on his April 13 broadcast, and his writers probably thought they were pretty clever when they pieced an item denigrating the tax protests by using the sexual term "teabagging."  Urbandictionary.com, cited multiple times by one MSNBC guest, describes it as when a man places his testicles "onto someone's face, or into their mouth."

"For most Americans, Wednesday, April 15th will be Tax Day," Shuster said as he began a soliloquy with about a dozen separate oral sex puns. "But in our fourth story tonight: It's going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they're going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals.

Time online editor Ana Marie Cox apparently believes a dated quip by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney should be considered a "macaca moment." During a Florida event on Monday, Romney, joking with a group of young people, quoted a rather lame song by the Baha Men. After asking who had a camera, he blurted, "Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?"

Now, most people would simply smile or appreciate Romney's friendly, if somewhat dorky, sense of humor. Cox, however, at Time's "Swampland" blog, wondered, "Shouldn't it be a 'macaca moment'? I suspect he's not being pilloried for it because the moment [sic] less offensive than it is cringe-inducing..." She also described the candidate's comments, which occurred at a Martin Luther King day event, as "jive talking." (Hat tip to Hot Air, who also remembered that Cox previously went after Romney for not taking proper care of the family dog.) Is Time's online editor simply looking for a scandal, any scandal, to hit Mitt Romney with?  

Update 15:34 (see bottom of post): Cox explains her rug joke.

I had great expectations when Ana Marie Cox turned up on the "Morning Joe" panel, confident the tart-tongued former Wonkette would produce plenty of grist for our NB mill. But over the course of the week, Cox has been disappointingly subdued, leaving it to the congenial Tamron Hall to produce our headlines. Perhaps Ana Marie's new gig at staid "Time" magazine has caused her to hide her acerbic light under a barrel.

But the strain of being restrained was maybe too much for Ana Marie, for she began this morning's show with a catty swipe at Katie Couric.

Host Joe Scarborough began the opening chit-chat by noting that CBS Evening News anchor Couric has announced her plans to visit Iraq and Syria. That's when Ana Marie pounced.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: So Katie's going off to the war zone. Did you read that? Katie Couric.

ANA MARIE COX: Needs some rugs, maybe. I don't know.

R-e-o-o-w-w-w!

View video here.