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" (Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post) Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which is, as you know, what Henry Purcell would have come up with had he composed &amp;quot;Dryer And Aeneas.&amp;quot; Before moving on to the customary electric teevee gobshitery, we should pause for a moment and acknowledge a couple of remarkable examples of print gobshitery. The first was in The Washington Post, wherein we learn that Willard And Ann Romney are having a hard time adjusting to being merely insanely rich people as opposed to insanely rich people whom other people have to pretend to like. Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There&amp;#039;s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. He wrote to one who&amp;#039;s having a liver transplant soon: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll change your bedpan, take you back and forth to treatment.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s not what Romney imagined he would be doing as the new year approaches. Four weeks after losing a presidential election he was convinced he would win, Romney&amp;#039;s rapid retreat into seclusion has been marked by repressed emotions, second-guessing and, perhaps for the first time in the overachiever&amp;#039;s adult life, sustained boredom, according to interviews with more than a dozen of Romney&amp;#039;s closest friends and advisers. Let me ask you a question, because you all have actual lives and do not write or assign stories for The Washington Post. Has anyone in your immediate circle of friends come to pondering, &amp;quot;Geez, I wonder what Mitt and Ann are up to these days?&amp;quot; Don&amp;#039;t we all just assume that they&amp;#039;re going to go on and live the lives of unimaginable luxury that they&amp;#039;ve lived for the past 30 years? (Also, too: if Mitt is plagued by sustained boredom, well, he still owes the whole country a seven-year debt in that peculiar currency.) This story makes me even more grateful that Romney didn&amp;#039;t win, The Mitt-&amp;#039;n-Ann-around-the-hearth stories would have taxed the gag reflex of a wildebeest. Elsewhere, His Eminence, Cardinal Douthat, issued yet another sermon from the bunny slope \u2014 this one, spectacularly, about how American women aren&amp;#039;t making enough American babies for America to keep being America. To his minimal credit, he does make a stab at speculating that dire economic straits may well have an influence on how many kids we&amp;#039;re pumping out, what with the fact they have to be fed and all. But you know what&amp;#039;s coming. Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion - a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It&amp;#039;s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place. Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made. People, even women people, are out there on the couches, fking without Ross&amp;#039;s permission, and doing so without making sure that each act is not &amp;quot;open to the creation of life,&amp;quot; to use the Vatican&amp;#039;s cock-deadening theological formulation. And now, not only are they disappointing his Eminence, but also they&amp;#039;re not resupplying the country with eager young people the way all women have always done. Anybody who thinks that a decline in child-rearing is &amp;quot;decadence&amp;quot; needs desperately to get out more and, probably, hang around in Vegas for a while. Let us begin our usual rounds, however, with This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs. (We can begin almost anywhere since the overall theme of the day was omigod-fiscal-cliff-throw-sick-old-people-into-the-pot!) Before getting to the ongoing budget fakery, though, we should note the presence on the panel of Dan Senor. Senor was the primary bullshit-slinger in Iraq. He also was a foreign-policy adviser to Willard Romney, who generally demonstrated a knowledge of foreign-policy slightly greater than that exhibited by whatever he ate for breakfast in the morning. In short, to anybody who has been conscious since 2002, Dan Senor ought not to have the credibility god gave a goat. Nevertheless, there he was, lecturing the president because the president met with groups that Dan Fking Senor thinks have no credibility. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s spending time with [AFL-CIO president] Richard Trumka and MoveOn.org. You tell me what he&amp;#039;s telling those hard-left groups about his position and how he can walk back to something more reasonable.&amp;quot; Yes, I think as one Republican House member said to me, good lesson in negotiating is don&amp;#039;t make your opening offer one of humiliation, which is what Republicans felt the White House has put forth in the last couple of days. He then moved on to stand up for wounded fee-fees everywhere. Yes, I think as one Republican House member said to me, good lesson in negotiating is don&amp;#039;t make your opening offer one of humiliation, which is what Republicans felt the White House has put forth in the last couple of days. Please explain to me the value of having this person in television. The Clinton Guy was quick to move on to explain that a lot of people who do not make as much money as he does entertaining the likes of Dan Senor are going to have to share some &amp;quot;pain&amp;quot; as we slide toward the Gentle Fiscal Incline. First came Tom Cole, this week&amp;#039;s allegedly reasonable Republican, who certainly has had the microchip reprogrammed since last week. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think we need to put a formal proposal out on the table...Speaker [John Boehner] has already said revenue is on the table. He has got an idea about how to get there in terms of not raises rates, but finding it in other ways through tax code reform. I think that makes a lot of sense, and that&amp;#039;s a doable thing, but beyond that, you know, we&amp;#039;ll wait and see how the negotiations go.&amp;quot; Well done, Tom. Fetch. Good boy. But soon, it was time for the Clinton Guy to deliver the sad news that some zombie-eyed granny-starving will be necessary so that we all will have some &amp;quot;skin in the game.&amp;quot;  Let me bring that to Congressman Ellison, because we started to see the beginnings of a counteroffer this weekend from Senator Mitch McConnell and Republicans. He told the Wall Street Journal, he offered three things, he said we need to see higher Medicare premiums paid by the wealthier, number one. He said a gradual increase in the eligibility age for Medicare and some adjustment to Social Security COLA. I believe those are all nonstarters to you and the progressive caucus. Wait. whoa. Did you see what the clever boy did right there? All of a sudden, Social Security, which does not add a penny to The Deficit, and on which nobody on this panel ever will have to depend, is in the mix there. It&amp;#039;s amazing. He pulled out the tablecloth and the fruitbowl didn&amp;#039;t even move. Amazing. There was some fiscal cliffery over on Face The Nation, where former Moghul Empire Dallas bureau chief Bob Schieffer brought on a spokesperson from the Fix The Debt grifters to spoon out our tough medicine, not a drop of which ever will cross the tongues of the corporate pirates who sign her checks. (Let&amp;#039;s mention, too, that our old pal Tim Geithner was pretty solid as a spokesman on all three network shows.) First, though, Huckleberry Closetcase came on and pulled the same trick that the Clinton Guy did,with slightly less panache, but with some truly ahistorical sleight-of-hand. A hundred percent of Americans are going to lose everything we know as America if we don&amp;#039;t fix entitlements. We&amp;#039;re becoming Greece because of out-of-control entitlement spending. There&amp;#039;s no age adjustment for Medicare and Social Security. There is no means testing in the president&amp;#039;s plan. We should do what Ronald Reagan and Tip O&amp;#039;Neill did, adjust the age for retirement and means-test benefits, do it together, and Republicans should put revenues on the table. And the president&amp;#039;s plan does nothing but damn us to become Greece. So saith a man, it should ever be noted, who enjoys the benefits of a single-payer, government-run health-care plan, both as a senator and as a veteran. But it was the lady from Fix The Debt who was Seriously Worried About It All. CEO&amp;#039;s, it seems, aren&amp;#039;t hiring, not because so many of them are sitting on big piles of money, but because democracy is messy and, sometimes, the people behind whom the CEO&amp;#039;s line up don&amp;#039;t win elections. The cheapest form of stimulus is certainty. And we don&amp;#039;t have any of that right now. And what you see is CEOs not being able to hire, small businesses not being able to invest, and households not knowing if we are going to have a real recovery where jobs come back when we should be able to do that. And basically the election is over. And what people want is to stop the fighting and to see real governing. Note to Maya \u2014 what&amp;#039;s going on is real governing. The people who pay your salary are basically undemocratic whiners who don&amp;#039;t understand why they can&amp;#039;t write a memo to stop it from raining. But, if you want to bring the pain, there&amp;#039;s no place better than Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party. Oh, and what a lineup of fabulous guest stars. Grover Norquist, of whom no Republican ever has heard. Wall Street shill Maria Bartiromo and Wall Street crazy wrong person Jim Cramer. On &amp;quot;the left,&amp;quot; we had Claire (The Luckiest Woman Alive) McCaskill and Chris Van Hollen. I swear, they book this show just to see if I&amp;#039;ll jump out a window. The Dancin&amp;#039; Master wasted no time in trying to get Geithner to help him with his future financial planning. GREGORY: In terms of tax rates, in your mind, you don&amp;#039;t have to go back to the Clinton era tax rates for this to be a workable deal? MR. GEITHNER: Well, I-- I think you do. GREGORY: All the way up? Yes, David, All The Way Up into the low 30&amp;#039;s again. Whatever will you do? Rather than contemplate that horror, the Dancin&amp;#039;s Master put on the leather mask, picked up the bastinado, and called for pain. GREGORY: Let me come back to the idea of, what is the pain point for Democrats here? What is the pain that Democrats are going to have to be willing to live with to get the kind of deal that you&amp;#039;re driving with Republicans on taxes when it comes to both spending cuts, particularly spending cuts to programs like Medicare? The Pain Point, That&amp;#039;s the most important thing. We must get to The Pain Point so that People Who Are Not David Gregory will pay a price for the profligate way they have been getting sick and dying on the public dime. This theme was expanded upon during the panel discussion. He got his Pain Point on again with Senator Bob Corker, an alleged moderate, who only was too happy to comply. Well, I think that&amp;#039;s right. I mean, the administration has put something out that polls well, taxing the wealthy. What they haven&amp;#039;t done is anything to deal with entitlements, which is painful. And you&amp;#039;re not going to have a deal until that happens. Most Americans don&amp;#039;t realize that the average family in America today pays into Medicare throughout their lifetime 119 thousand dollars in today&amp;#039;s dollars. They take out over their lifetime in today&amp;#039;s dollars 357 thousand dollars. And so the president has laid nothing out there to change that dynamic, so \u2014 okay. Die quicker, you mooching bastards. Luckily, there was Claire McCaskill, newly re-elected, and a champion for ... well, what exactly is she a champion for? As I&amp;#039;ve said before, you know, Donald Trump may need medication, but he certainly doesn&amp;#039;t need the government to pay for it. I mean, we&amp;#039;ve got to get to a point where we are really having people who can afford to pay for their health care, having them to take that responsibility instead of the government. Because it there&amp;#039;s one thing the past few years have taught us, it&amp;#039;s that cuts aimed at the plutocrats never, ever filter down to the middle class. Bring that horse inside the walls. Ignore the sneezing you hear from within. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16837/sunday-talk-shows-fiscal-cliff-120312/>