Many years ago, my friend Marcus delightedly brought over his latest purchase, along with the usual two six-packs: an early twentieth century etiquette book.  As we got drunker, he kept finding ever more hilarious admonitions in its yellowed pages, reading them out loud in his thick German accent.  “Don’t ever discuss personal topics in front of children or servants,” he recited, giggling and gesturing with his finger on his lips toward my friend Judy’s boyfriend, who was going through a rough spot in his career and was then cleaning Marcus’ and my apartments each week.

Poor Mitt Romney evidently spent too much time with the Book of Mormon and not enough with Amy Vanderbilt, and somehow missed this important lesson.

On first glance, it is a simple question to be laughed at or outright dismissed because someone with a lack of knowledge on the Global War on Terrorism would think it could never happen. That is how a number of people who consider themselves to be “serious” individuals reacted to the question of whether the president could authorize a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil, which Senator Rand Paul forced Attorney General Eric Holder to answer without equivocation. However, when considering all the powers both President George W. Bush and now President Barack Obama have claimed and embraced in the Global War on Terrorism to target, isolate and sometimes even neutralize individuals without probable cause and only on mere suspicion, it seems much less looney to ask with a straight face.

In what is probably one of the fastest flip-flops in political history, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) now says he is actually open to creating a pathway to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform, even though he literally just published a book that called only for creating a pathway to legal residency.

We all know there isn’t much you can do to get exiled from the Village Media circuit. If being wrong about war, weapons of mass destruction, the Clinton impeachment, the Catholic church’s child rape scandals, and Team Obama’s drone-assassination policy were bannable offenses, all we’d have for cable channels would be test-patterns (remember them?)

But it used to be, back in the days of standards that mattered.

Pfc. Bradley Manning pled guilty to elements of ten of the twenty-two charges he faces on February 28. Manning also read a statement he typed up himself that explained his thoughts about the documents and video he disclosed and when and how he transmitted the information to WikiLeaks.

A review of three major United States cable news networks shows MSNBC did not mention Manning once .

Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs appeared in his new role as MSNBC contributor on Sunday and acknowledged it was official policy within the administration of President Barack Obama to not acknowledge the existence of a drone program.

A documentary, “Hubris: Selling the Iraq War,” aired on MSNBC to mark the tenth-anniversary of the selling of the Iraq War by President George W. Bush’s administration. For someone unaware of the extent to which President Bush and neoconservatives in his administration went to manufacture the case for going to war in Iraq, the documentary is a fairly good presentation of much of the deception and manipulation that occurred.

Appearing on the MSNBC program, “Morning Joe,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said President Barack Obama’s drone programs have been “very effective.”

Because of a ten year mainstream media whitewash, it’s been generally accepted that “mistakes” resulted in a war that claimed over 4,800 US troops. But this week, MSNBC will rock the boat, suggesting false pretenses took us to war, meaning the nation should start debating consequences.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson on her show Thursday night. The previous night she hyped up the exclusive interview, as he had not been on television since leaving his position at the Pentagon.

Yet, during the twenty or so minutes that Johnson was on her program, she did not ask a single specific question where he would have been forced to address President Barack Obama’s continued use of drones.