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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which is, as you know, what Aaron Copland would have come up with had he composed Fanfare For The Common Crow. Before we move along to our usual fare \u2014 and, oh, my dear blog, what a clustery cluster of nougaty fk was Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party this week \u2014 there are a couple of things we should address. First of all, on Friday night, two people who usually are not counted among the gobshites became worthy of notice. First, for no earthly reason anyone can explain, Bill Maher hosted sideshow freak Christine O&amp;#039;Donnell, who has no real job that I can identify, and who has approximately the same relevance to the politics of the moment as Minnie Pearl does. Maher has a sweet-tooth for bad political performance art (Why, yes, Ms. Coulter, we have a nice carafe of pure human blood here in the Green Room...) that really does get out of hand after a while. A freedom food-chain? Second, I may have overreacted, but Jon Stewart&amp;#039;s DNC wrap-up seemed to be edging not only toward his can&amp;#039;t-we-have-politics-without-shouting? shtick, but also toward Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s argument that the president failed to deliver all the ponies the country thought he&amp;#039;d promised back in 2008. Odd, actually. And the second point is about our cast of characters. Let us, as Sister Marie de Paul used to say, compare and contrast. On the first Meet The Press after the Republican National Convention, there were two Republicans invited on to chew the fat with the Dancin&amp;#039; Master: Carly Fiorina and Newt Gingrich. On the first Meet The Press after the Democratic National Convention, there were two Republicans \u2014 both Romneys \u2014 invited on to chew the fat with the Dancin&amp;#039; Master. This, to me, is weird. So are the comedy stylings of Bill (Sportin&amp;#039; Life) Bennett, but we&amp;#039;ll get back to him. Maher and Stewart will sharpen up again, but Disco Dave, I fear, has passed far beyond the Veil of Centrism and fully into the Dark Realms of the Lotus Eaters, where sweet oblivion is bestowed upon all. It&amp;#039;s not so much that he tosses softballs. It&amp;#039;s that he doesn&amp;#039;t recognize the full scope of what&amp;#039;s happening right before his eyes. He hosted Willard Romney for a lengthy interview in which Romney essentially burned his entire raison d&amp;#039;etre as a presidential candidate to the ground and the Dancin&amp;#039; Master didn&amp;#039;t seem to notice. Let us begin with the fact that he doesn&amp;#039;t really seem to have a grasp on what a truly remarkable liar Romney has become.... GREGORY: What about Bill Clinton. He had quite an impact. Do you think he could get elected today for president? MR. ROMNEY: You know, if the Constitution weren&amp;#039;t in his way, perhaps. But I \u2014 I don&amp;#039;t know the answer to that. But he \u2014 he did stand out in contrast with the other speakers. I think he \u2014 he really did elevate the \u2014 the Democratic Convention in a lot of ways. And \u2014 and \u2014 and frankly, the \u2014 the contrast may not have been as \u2014 as attractive as \u2014 as Barack Obama might have preferred if he were choosing who would go before him and who would go after. GREGORY: I want to ask you something a little bit more personal. You \u2014 you both are guarded about in your faith. No, NO, NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! Dave, bubba? The man just lied to your face. The man just made a point so completely detached from physical reality that you should be wondering at this point whether or not you are talking to someone on mushrooms. You were in Charlotte. You watched the speech. You saw the reaction in the hall. You know, because you are not stupid, that Clinton gave a rousing defense of the Obama presidency and that he did so as a completely partisan Democrat. Just because Romney feels, quite rightly, that he can be upstaged at the podium by a bowl of walnuts, doesn&amp;#039;t mean you should lose focus. Here is what your follow-up should have been: GREGORY: Mr. Romney, when you say stuff like that, don&amp;#039;t you realize that you&amp;#039;re just daring Bill Clinton to come out and stomp another mudhole in your ass, and don&amp;#039;t you people ever get tired of his doing that? (N. Leroy Gingrich, defender of civilization&amp;#039;s rules and Leader [perhaps] of the civilizing forces, who has as many old mudholes in his ass from Clinton as the Whale had stuck in him Ahab&amp;#039;s lances, was over on CNN being even more comical than Romney was: &amp;quot;You have a real president, and then you have this guy who&amp;#039;s a pretender.&amp;quot; Jesus, Newt, at this point it&amp;#039;s just a bondage fantasy on your part, isn&amp;#039;t it?) We continue now to the subject of health-care reform. Here, the Republican candidate entertained us by doing the entire &amp;quot;Make &amp;#039;Em Laugh&amp;quot; routine from Singin&amp;#039; In The Rain atop his own dick. MR. ROMNEY: Well, I&amp;#039;m not getting rid of all of healthcare reform. Of course, there are a number of things that I like in healthcare reform that I&amp;#039;m going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their \u2014 their family up to whatever age they might like. I also want individuals to be able to buy insurance, health insurance, on their own as opposed to only being able to get it on a tax advantage basis through their company. GREGORY: Well, that brings us to Medicare, because one of the things you believe in was the idea of premium support or a voucher for seniors under Medicare is to achieve the goal of solvency.  No. Stop. Do not go ahead to Medicare yet. The man just tried to sell you gallstones for oysters right there. Not only is he completely reversing himself on &amp;quot;repeal and replace&amp;quot; right there before your eyes \u2014 presto! \u2014 but also, he&amp;#039;s attempting to argue that he can do some of the stuff nationally that he did in Massachusetts, but without the individual mandate that his base believes will soon have the black helicopters hovering around their medicine chests. You cannot have what he says he wants to keep unless you keep the mandate. That&amp;#039;s why, along with all the goodies he mentioned, we have one in Massachusetts. He knows that. He negotiated the damn bill.  And we conclude with the glorious moment when he threw his own zombie-eyed, granny-starving running mate under the dog-laden family station wagon: MR. ROMNEY: Well, I want to maintain defense spending at the current level of the GDP. I don&amp;#039;t want to keep bringing it down as the president&amp;#039;s doing. This sequestration idea of the White House, which is cutting our defense, I think, is an extraordinary miscalculation... GREGORY: Republican leaders... MR. ROMNEY: ...in the wrong direction. GREGORY: ...agreed to that deal to \u2014 to extend the debt ceiling. MR. ROMNEY: And that was a big mistake. I thought it was a mistake on the \u2014 on the part of the White House to propose it. I think it was a mistake for Republicans to go along with it. &amp;quot;Sequestration&amp;quot; exists at all because the Republicans in the House of Representatives are vandalistic children who threw a tantrum that nearly blew up the country&amp;#039;s full faith and credit. You have proposed to put the head toddler one heartbeat away from the presidency. And now you&amp;#039;re telling us what a bad idea it was. Wow. The incontrovertible evidence from this interview is that Willard Romney is probably the most obviously untrustworthy major-party candidate for the presidency of the past 40 years. That seems to have eluded entirely the person conducting the interview. It also eluded the entire panel whose discussion ensued after the interview was over. Gregory asked my man Chuck Todd about Romney&amp;#039;s sequestration tap-dance, and Chuck knocked it deep into the Budweiser Non Sequitur Beer Garden above the right field stands. CHUCK TODD (Political Director, NBC News; Chief White House Correspondent): Well, this is about, I think Romney playing battleground state politics. I hate to say it. But that&amp;#039;s what he does. He was right after the interview where did he go? Went to Virginia, where some of these cuts, if they take place, but people seem to have amnesia about the whole point of what sequester was. It was to force a conversation, it was to force new negotiations. Nobody wants to sequester. Actually, Chuck, sequester was to make sure the country had an economy for the ensuing several months and, I can assure you, that the House Republicans want to sequester most social programs back to 1890, while some Democrats believe that, maybe, some day, a little, defense spending should be cut back. See, here&amp;#039;s the deal. We have two parties in this country right now. One party is a center-right party that believes that it is unseemly to let old people die in the streets. And the other party is insane. In any &amp;quot;conversation,&amp;quot; the first people in the first party say, &amp;quot;Well, okay, then we&amp;#039;ll cut here and here and you, maybe, ask some people to pay a little more.&amp;quot; And then, the other party says: &amp;quot;Roogie-roogie! Gabba-gabba-hey!&amp;quot; and throws its Maypo against the wall. That is the &amp;quot;conversation&amp;quot; in our politics today. Perhaps believing that his fellow panelists were so overcome by the dancing flames of Romney&amp;#039;s self-immolation that they wouldn&amp;#039;t notice, ol&amp;#039; Sportin&amp;#039; Life took the opportunity to run a bluff that was a perfect example of why he walked away from the gaming tables having lost the gross domestic product of the Ottoman Empire. Let me just say. I don&amp;#039;t think we throw out the whole Bush whole eight years. We won the war in Iraq. Bush did a lot of fine things. He can separate himself from Bush policy particularly in the last couple of years. And he&amp;#039;s already done so by having Paul Ryan there. Paul Ryan was a critic of Bush spending and he&amp;#039;s a critic of Obama spending. And our old friend, Clio, The Muse Of History, finds herself looking longingly at a 10-gallon jug of Xanax and a quart of Sterno. &amp;quot;We&amp;quot; won the war in Iraq? We did? Really? Has anyone told the Iraqis, because they might like to throw a parade. We&amp;#039;ll leave aside the &amp;quot;lot of fine things&amp;quot; business in order to point out that, prior to his becoming a nationally known zombie-eyed granny-starver, Paul Ryan voted for every single Bush administration initiative \u2014 both credit-card wars, Medicare Part B \u2014 that sent the deficit zooming off toward Krypton. If Ryan&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;criticism&amp;quot; of Bush&amp;#039;s spending had been any more vigorous, we might all be using Chinese debit cards by now. Meanwhile, the Republican ticket dissolved into further incoherence over on This Week With The Handsome Clinton Guy Horrified By Blowjobs when Romney&amp;#039;s second banana sold out the top man on something Romney had said during one of those multi-player clown competitions with which the Republicans entertained us all over the winter and throughout the spring. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no deal to walk away from. The point is, you&amp;#039;re not giving me a deal to look at. You&amp;#039;re giving me ratios. Here&amp;#039;s \u2014 let me say this. Our problem is not that we are overtaxed. We are overtaxed. Our problem is we spend too much money.&amp;quot; Yes, that&amp;#039;s Paul Ryan criticizing someone for being vague. By the end of this election, we may have seen it all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15717/mitt-romney-meet-the-press-2012-12555492/>