[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]
On Friday's Hardball, Chris Matthews and Howard Dean slammed the supposedly "lunatic" faction of the Republican Party for opposing President Obama's $3.7 billion request to deal with the ongoing crisis at the U.S-Mexico border. Dean likened likened the political stalemate over this issue and in general in Washington to McCarthyism in the 1950s: "It reminds me of the 'who lost China' debate...where one side is frothing at the mouth and finding communists under every bed; and the other side – including some reasonable Republicans...actually trying to run the country."
Matthews endorsed the former Vermont governor's take, and targeted fiscal conservatives/the Tea Party as somehow akin to Mao's Red Guards:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: ...I think the governor is right. A lot of these lawmakers are sitting around reading Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' like it's the Little Red Book of Mao. (Reagan laughs) It's like all the information's in this book. All we have to do is deregulate – which is how we got into the problem, as the governor points out, in terms of the financial crisis. Everybody knows that we got into trouble because of deregulation. They say the answer now is deregulation.