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"  Welcome back to our weekly survey of Our National Dialogue which, of course, is what Coltrane would have come up with, had he composed A Foghorn Supreme. I think they should make one of those Discovery Channel specials about it, like the one on filming the giant squid swimming in the trackless deep that ran this weekend. Our intrepid film crew takes to the wilds of Arizona, braving the onslaught of biting insects, venomous snakes, poisonous lizards, fat guys with AK&amp;#039;s hunting Mes-kins at the border, and 85-year old retirees in fishing hats driving 25 mph in the passing lane. They seek a creature many think is merely a legend, more rumored than it ever has been observed. They catch tantalizing glimpses of it, ducking between the rocks. They talk to the locals, who speak only in whispers. At night, they hear its faint howls, but it always stays one desperate step away from them as they pour themselves into the search, wandering deeper into the desert and the strip malls. Then, one day, when all hope is nearly lost, they see their elusive quarry and force it, by degrees to come on camera for all the world to see. They have sought, and they have found...John McCain. So, congratulations to the intrepid adventurers at This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs for running their quarry to ground this week. The strain of wrestling McCain into a chair in front of the cameras was plain on everyone&amp;#039;s face and, somehow, The Clinton Guy managed to pry from McCain an opinion or two about the guy who beat him four years ago, and then, because the United States once again concocted an elaborate plot to harsh the McCain mellow, got himself re-elected again last November. Whereupon That One In The White House sent Hillary Clinton to Capitol Hill to talk about Benghazi and make John McCain look silly, and that&amp;#039;s John McCain&amp;#039;s job, by cracky. MCCAIN: Why in the world, on September 11th of all days, with all these warnings, didn&amp;#039;t we have assets there for seven hours to \u2014 there are so many questions that \u2014 that are unanswered. RADDATZ: So this is not over in your mind at all? Not over? MCCAIN: What did the president do during this period of time? There&amp;#039;s two movies been made about getting bin Laden with every tick-tock of every minute. We still don&amp;#039;t know what the president was doing.  Actually, he was Being President, which is what bugs the elusive McCain more than anything else. (And can we reiterate this whole Benghazi nonsense is about what was said on The Sunday Showz? That&amp;#039;s the most revelatory thing about this affair \u2014 that these quaint Beltway folk actually believe that &amp;quot;the American people&amp;quot; are informed by these weekly circle jerks. Actually, on the average Sunday morning in September, the vast majority of &amp;quot;the American people&amp;quot; are either at church, or calling their bookie to lay five dimes to tease the Packers and the over. Somehow, what you say on The Sunday Showz de facto has become what the lawbooks call &amp;quot;hallowed by oath,&amp;quot; when, in fact, it is only hallowed by commercials for automobile insurance.) The elusive McCain also talked about immigration, and about how that grumpy old guy who looked like him and was wearing his underwear, and who made that commercial grousing, &amp;quot;Build the dang fence&amp;quot; a few years back, was stupid and wrong and only looked like him. RADDATZ: So how do you convince Republicans about the path to citizenship? MCCAIN: Well, look, I&amp;#039;ll give you a little straight talk. (Ed. Note \u2014 At which point, 100 reporters who covered McCain in 2000 held up cigarette lighters and shouted, &amp;quot;Freebird!&amp;quot; at the top of their lungs. We proceed.) Look at the last election. Look at the last election. We are losing dramatically the Hispanic vote, which we think should be ours, for a variety of reasons, and we&amp;#039;ve got to understand that. Second of all, this \u2014 we can&amp;#039;t go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status. We cannot forever have children who were born here \u2014 who were brought here by their parents when they were small children to live in the shadows, as well. So I think the time is right. By the way, we just acted to avert a nuclear option in the Senate. Believe it or not, I see some glimmer of bipartisanship out there.  Unless, of course, he gets primaried by some nativist nutball. Then, as was the case in 2008, he will be forced once again to admit that he probably couldn&amp;#039;t possibly vote for his own immigration bill. Straight talk! Whipping Post! Eventually, the folks at ABC allowed the elusive McCain to slip back into the dark depthless shadows in which he is most comfortable. (The Sunday Showz are strictly catch-and-release.) But, luckily, his rare public appearance was caught on camera for posterity and it will have to do. Until...the next time. Later, on one of the panels, a Republican congresscritter from where-the-fck-else? Arizona named David Schweikert came out on one of the panels to explain Whither Goest The Party and, also, to explain that the Republicans aren&amp;#039;t the heartless starvers of grannies they are made out to be. (That will come later, trust me.) Yeah, no, look, we may need to change the way we tell our story, but we seem to go through this every two years. In 2010, it was the Democrats that were having a \u2014 reflecting on what had happened with the huge majority that came back and the U.S. House and the Republican side. In 2006 and 2008, the Republicans went through this. That&amp;#039;s actually one of the beauties of our system, is every two years there&amp;#039;s this reflection of where we&amp;#039;re going, what we&amp;#039;re saying. The fact of the matter is we have a problem as a party. I believe we tell the truth. I actually believe we&amp;#039;re much more analytical. We&amp;#039;re accountants. Sometimes, though, being an accountant doesn&amp;#039;t pull the heart strings, doesn&amp;#039;t tell the story.  If these guys are accountants, of course, given the Reagan deficit, the Bush I recession, and the Bush II put-it-all-on-the-Amex deficit, the entire population of the United States would be doing time in the federal pokey for fraud. And, as it happens, Schweikert was one of the Republicans who got booted from his committee seat for being too wingnutty even for John Boehner&amp;#039;s purposes so, by all means, throw him out there as a spokesman. I&amp;#039;d believe him as much as I believe George Effing Will knows anything about what the physical requirements for combat are. WILL: OK. That&amp;#039;s fine. And pilots, we know that 152 women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. We know that they&amp;#039;re now serving on submarines, and it&amp;#039;s all good for the military. But there are certain anatomical facts about upper body strength and stamina.  There are no words. Moving along to Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party, they were serious about bringing the pain this week, so they put together a remarkable double-bill. First came Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin and first runner-up in last November&amp;#039;s Vice Presidential Pageant. Since then, Ryan has returned to the Washington and buried himself in his old part as The Compassionate Wonk Who Just Cares About The Numbers. It&amp;#039;s like watching Hal Holbrook do Mark Twain in the old days. His most recent one-man play is yet another &amp;quot;budget,&amp;quot; by which the federal budget will be balanced in 10 years, and not in 30, which was the time frame of Ryan&amp;#039;s last &amp;quot;budget,&amp;quot; the one that everyone ran screaming through the streets to escape, and the one at which the Congressional Budget Office hasn&amp;#039;t stopped laughing yet. But first, demonstrating the mad political skillz that endeared him to the national electorate, Ryan tried to drive a wedge between the president and the secretary of state. Look, if we had a [Hillary] Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles as chief of staff of the White House or president of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now.&amp;quot;  He then went on to repudiate most of the fiscal policy on which he and Willard Romney ran on, almost two months after the rest of the country did. If Mitt Romney and I won the election, they would not have happened. You know why? Because we would have gone and worked with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to actually put the budget on a path to balance and would have saved defense. So where are we now? I think the sequester is going to happen because that $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, we can&amp;#039;t lose those spending cuts. [...] But we think these sequesters will happen because the Democrats have opposed our efforts to replace those cuts with others and they&amp;#039;ve offered no alternatives. During the campaign, of course, the sequester was the worst thing to happen to the national economy since the birth of John Maynard Keynes. Now, it will have to happen because the Democrats won&amp;#039;t agree to immolate the food-stamp program in favor of saving a little military pork. He then moved on to express the pain brought to his tender fee-fee by a president who went out of his way to remind Ryan of Ryan&amp;#039;s entire public career.  &amp;quot;When the president does a switcheroo like that, what he&amp;#039;s trying to say is that we are maligning these programs that people have earned throughout their working lives...It&amp;#039;s kind of a convenient twist of terms to try and shadowbox a straw man in order to win an argument by default.&amp;quot; Dammit, I was talking about big black bucks buying T-bones, like Reagan used to, and not about the programs that are keeping your granny alive, at least not out loud (vouchervouchervoucher). And certainly not the Social Security you all paid into so I could go to college and get a job preaching self-reliance from my congressional sinecure. Quite a Keynesian project himself, is our Paul. He&amp;#039;s as much a result of federal spending as the space shuttle was. What is wrong with you people, anyway? You can count on me, because I knowz economicz, beeyotches. Well, we can debate the efficacy of Keynesian economics or not, and I think that it&amp;#039;s pretty clear that it doesn&amp;#039;t work...We&amp;#039;re not preaching austerity; we&amp;#039;re preaching growth and opportunity. What we&amp;#039;re saying is if you get our fiscal ship fixed, you preempt austerity.  A better brand of catfood. Also, someone pick Krugman up off the floor. A debt crisis is what they have in Europe, which is austerity...You cut the safety net immediately, you cut retirement benefits for people who have already retired, you raise taxes, slow down the economy, young people don&amp;#039;t have jobs. That&amp;#039;s the austerity that comes when you have a debt crisis. And when you keep stacking up trillion dollar deficits like this government is doing, it&amp;#039;s bringing us to that moment. Our job is to prevent and preempt austerity so we can get back to growth.  In other words, austerity is always something that hasn&amp;#039;t happened yet, but it might, and only by enacting my new budget, which would cut $900 billion from programs that many people need to survive, can we stave off austerity, which is exactly what I say it is and nothing else. At least when the president shadow-boxes strawmen, it&amp;#039;s a fair fight. Then came Jim DeMint, the former senator from South Carolina who is now running the ideological chop-shop known as the Heritage Foundation. DeMint sat down with the Dancing Master and gave a very convincing impersonation of a political lunatic. When the Dancing Master asked him about Colin Powell&amp;#039;s comments regarding what Powell saw as the thinly veiled racism behind much of the criticism of the president, DeMint exploded in a cloud of snowflake Jeebus babies. The fact that we are losing over 3,000 unborn children a day is an important issue...But Republicans or conservatives should not engage in a wish list about exceptions for abortion when the other side will not even agree that we have real people, real human beings. And we need to fight the battle where it should be fought. Life is important. We know from all the new technology and improved sonograms that we do have a baby...Instead of just offering my opinion on some hypothetical debate about exceptions for abortions, we need to move it back and particularly work with the states that are fighting just for the personhood of the child. And if we can start there, I think America will move with us. I think I speak for the entire class when I say \u2014 what in the unholy fk is this man raving about? When a waiter asks him what he&amp;#039;d like to start with this evening, does he deliver an impassioned defense of the automatic transmission? When he&amp;#039;s buying a plane ticket, and the agent asks him for his destination, does he go on for five minutes on the relative merits of pickles with tuna fish? How does this man get through the day, what with his various sequiturs so thoroughly non? And we conclude this week with the performance of Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a curiously popular guest on these weekly shindigs, who stopped by to chat with former Cortez expedition correspondent Bob Schieffer about our guns and why we love them so. (She was joined on set by N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules and Leader \u2014 perhaps \u2014 of the civilizing forces, who has made a career out of being a curiously popular guest on these programs.) But, first, there was this baffling, Runyonesque exchange. SCHIEFFER: With us this morning...Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee. Congresswoman Blackburn \u2014 but you actually liked to be called congressman, don&amp;#039;t you? BLACKBURN: Congress Marsha. SCHIEFFER: Congress Marsha. BLACKBURN: Whatever works. Congress Marsha? That sounds like the multilateral meeting of European states called to settle the disposition of the bedrooms in the Brady household. But, whatever works, assuming you do. Anyway, she doesn&amp;#039;t want to talk about guns quite yet. Not until we talk about the &amp;quot;root causes&amp;quot; of gun violence which are, apparently, defined by whoever contributes least to Congress Marsha. You do because you want to make certain that people are safe in public places. You want to make certain that children are safe at school. But, Bob, I&amp;#039;ve got to tell you, doing a so-called assault weapons ban is going after a symptom, and as teachers have said to me, don&amp;#039;t focus on whatever is the weapon, get to the root cause. Look at some of these mental health issues. Look at some of these drugs that are involved in this. Look at some of the is violence that is permeating this society. Teachers, parents are all saying, you know, you need to drill down on this a little deeper. Be a little bit more thoughtful on it. And, you know, I&amp;#039;m with the speaker. Why should law-abiding citizens be compromised because you&amp;#039;ve got some bad actors over here that are not complying. Has there been a single proposal on what we should do next that hasn&amp;#039;t involved someone talking about mental health issues and Our Violent Society? The president certainly has. Several of his tyrannical executive suggestions concerned those very things. But we are also now talking about our guns, and how easy it is for criminals and lunatics to get their hands on them, and Congress Marsha doesn&amp;#039;t want to talk about that, so Congress Marsha is blowing more smoke than a Phish concert. Besides, why should we pass any new laws as long as somebody &amp;quot;over there&amp;quot; will ignore them and break them? Hell, whatever works. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18432/gobshites-in-congress/>