Yesterday's Face The Nation certainly did not reflect CBS's best efforts in terms of showcasing serious people discussing American politics, or in terms of holding guests accountable for their outlandish attacks on the president.

As Media Matters noted, CBS on Sunday aired an interview with Donald Trump who claimed, yet again, that he was kind of/maybe thinking about running for president as an independent. (Or he might just endorse one of the current GOP candidates; he's not sure.) Why Trump's self-promotion would still pass as news in 2012 remains a mystery.

Worse, Face The Nation host Bob Schieffer never asked Trump about the thoroughly debunked, Obama birther conspiracy theory that the businessman proudly hyped last year only to watch it collapse in spectacular fashion.

What else transpired on Face The Nation yesterday? Discussing this week's Florida Republican primary, the program hosted Rep. Allen West (R-FL), who is widely known for using slanderous, AM radio-style hate rants against Democrats.

In fact, here' what West told a partisan crowd the day before he appeared on Face the Nation:

We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. “Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

On Face The Nation though, host Schieffer never asked West why he had demanded that Obama, Reid and Pelosi ”get the hell out" of the country.

It's possible Schieffer didn't know about West's comments, even though they were reported the night before Sunday's Face The Nation aired. Either way, CBS ought to know better than to treat reckless name-callers (and freshman Congressmen) like West as a important voices in American politics.

Not so long ago, periphery players like Trump and West would have been shunned by the Beltway press and treated as the not-serious people they are. Today, the Obama-bashing duo have been mainstreamed thanks to outlets like Face the Nation that refuse to hold guests accountable for their radical attacks on the president.