MSNBC continues to fail to take the IRS targeting scandal seriously. On Thursday’s NOW with Alex Wagner, Ms. Wagner and her guest, Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post, showed their utter disdain for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and his committee’s ongoing investigation into the scandal.

Wagner took particular offense to Issa’s move to hold IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress, dismissing it as an attempt to “gum up the government works.” Mocking Issa and his fellow House Republicans, Wagner screeched:

MSNBC journalist and former Newsweek editor Howard Fineman on Sunday night offered perhaps the most bewildering Oscar tweet of the night. As 12 Years a Slave won best picture and Alfonso Cuaron became the first Mexican-born director to win an Academy Award, Fineman tweeted, “#AcademyAwards show diversity, tolerance, cultural creativity of US in Obama Era. Hard power matters, per Putin, but Oscars r as powerful.”

The Oscars are “as powerful” as Vladimir Putin? Will member of the Academy be invading a European country? Also, is it really necessary to bring Barack Obama into every discussion, even the seemingly unrelated Oscars?  Fineman received considerable blowback from his tweet and scrambled to clarify.

Most Americans view Christmas as a time to consider such lofty things as peace on earth and good will toward men.

Not MSNBC’s Chris Matthews who actually devoted his entire Christmas Eve Hardball show to mercilessly attacking eleven conservatives with assistance from a panel of some of the most conservative-hating liberals in the nation (video follows with transcript and commentary):

After he conducted a fawning interview with Barack Obama on Thursday, Chris Matthews turned to his liberal journalist friends for adulation. Former Newsweek editor Howard Fineman fawned over Obama and, at the same time, sympathized with the President: "Now, he's gone from Superman to Sisyphus. He's talking about rolling a boulder up the hill." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

What kind of metaphor is the journalist trying to make? Sisyphus had to roll a bolder up a hill as punishment for deception. Surely, that's not the liberal reporter's point? Speaking of the President, Fineman, who now is the editorial director for Huffington Post, lectured, "[Obama] has a much more mature view, but he has a moral view. I thought he made the moral case for ObamaCare."

A sneering group of MSNBC hosts and analysts on Thursday berated Sean Hannity for his "mindless" anti-government attitude, mocking him as "pathetic." The Fox News host gave an interview to Playboy magazine in which he dismissed much of the federal government as "dysfunctional." Ex-Newsweek editor Howard Fineman, who has bragged about "steering clear of partisanship," slammed Hannity for having a "deliberate lack of self-awareness [that] is just stunning."

Speaking of the federal government, Fineman continued, "One of the reasons why the system is so dysfunctional is because of the mindlessly accusatory nature of what he...what they [conservatives] do." The journalist, who has prided himself on "keeping an even keel ideologically," accused Hannity of being "an enthusiastically, vigorous user of that style of rhetoric and politics and it's one of the main reasons why things aren't working." Fineman exhorted viewers, "Wake up! Wake up!" [MP3 audio here. See video below.]