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" (Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post) Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which is, as we know, what Louis Armstrong would have come up with had he composed &amp;quot;Potato Head Cheese.&amp;quot; Before we begin, we should make note of the permanent departure from this vale of derp of our old friend, and one of the stars of our semi-regular weekly survey, the Dancin&amp;#039; Master. Andrea Mitchell Greenspan sat in for him, as the Dancin&amp;#039; Master declined to help NBC humiliate him publicly any further. He climbed down off the luxurious clothesline where he&amp;#039;d been hung out to dry and vanished from the scene, leaving AMG to eulogize him for the giant of broadcast journalism that he was. As most of you probably know, he is going to be replaced by my man Chuck Todd. As far as I know, there exists no tape of my man Chuck&amp;#039;s doing the electric slide with any political carnivores, so that will be the last time we see that wonderful video around these parts. But I expect my man Chuck to follow the footprints laid down on the floor by the Dancin&amp;#039; Master, but with numbers!. Or maybe they&amp;#039;ll just turn the whole thing into a quiz show featuring people in strange costumes and co-starring the ghost of Peggy Cass. That&amp;#039;s the way I&amp;#039;m rooting, anyway. Because, if nothing else, the ongoing events in Ferguson, Missouri show just how untethered from the reality of the lives lived by most Americans this weekly Sunday kabuki truly is. Every one of The Sunday Showz tried to deal with an ongoing event that simply cannot be wedged into our current who&amp;#039;s-up-who&amp;#039;s-down?, win the morning (!) political paradigm. Oh, AMG put the oddly invisible governor of Missouri, Jay Nixon, on the spit for a bit but, otherwise, it sounded like, in the immortal words of Crash Davis, Martians talking about a fungo. (Nixon, it should be said, hit for the Sunday slam, appearing on all three networks, probably to counteract the rumors that he was abducted by aliens just about the time Michael Brown was shot. He told old pal Martha Raddatz on This Week With The Clinton Guy shocked by blowjobs, that he had been shocked -- SHOCKED! -- by the overreaction of the local suburban Rambo cops: Yeah, all of us were thunderstruck by the pictures we saw. I mean, the overmilitarization, the IMRAPs rolling in, the guns pointed at kids in the street, all of that I think instead of ratcheting down, brought emotion up. And that&amp;#039;s why I made the unique decision to bring in our highway patrol, to have a local leader, Captain Johnson from that community in that community, which he has been, and to put a much different face on law enforcement there, and I think it has paid off while respecting and allowing the appropriate first amendment rights for people to grieve and to speak. I rather think the only relevantly thunderstruck people in Ferguson were the people at whom the tanks were aimed, as opposed to people terrified by the photos of them. ) Take, for example, AMG&amp;#039;s bamfoozlement over the militarized police forces now prowling the streets.  Where in the unholy fk have these people been? It&amp;#039;s not just the damned equipment, although arming your locals as though they were beat cops in Fallujah never made any sense. It&amp;#039;s the attitude that comes with the equipment, the attitude that allows your average local chief of police to decide he&amp;#039;s Patton on the way to Bastogne. No-knock warrants. SWAT teams to conduct simple drug busts. The very concept of a &amp;quot;war&amp;quot; on some drugs -- or, indeed, a &amp;quot;war&amp;quot; on terror --leads to the inescapable conclusion on the part of police that they should arm themselves as though an actual war was going on. This &amp;quot;started,&amp;quot; Andrea, in the mid-1980&amp;#039;s, and it was black folks in the cities that saw it first. Hell, &amp;quot;trigger-happy policin&amp;#039;&amp;quot; was one of the elements cited in Marvin Gaye&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Inner City Blues,&amp;quot; and that was in 1969. All that&amp;#039;s changed is the available weaponry. But the House Cup this week has to go to Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, who was visiting on CBS with all-conquering former Grand Armee embed Bob Schieffer, and who seemed to cling to the notion that, first and foremost, this particular president&amp;#039;s first duty is to be a vehicle of racial conciliation whose primary function is not to make the situation any more volatile than the tanks did.  Translation from the original weaselspeak: &amp;quot;If the president talks like a black person, he&amp;#039;s going to get shredded by the born-in-Kenya crowd, so let&amp;#039;s not disturb the horses.&amp;quot; Luckily, Michael Eric Dyson was there as a blessed corrective.  There is no centrist position here, no both-sides-do-it dodge behind which the Beltway media can hide. (And the performance of people like Ryan Reilly and Wesley Lowery last week put every talking head to shame.) Dyson brought the straight truth. There is only one side. Children should not be shot down and left in the street for four hours. Debating that makes cowards of us all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21372/the-gobshites-are-bamfoozled/>