<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Aaron Copland would have come up with had he written Fanbelt For The Common Man. Before we look at the work done by our electrified gobshites on the electric teevee set, let us pause for a moment and congratulate the editors of The New York Times Book Review for handing a serious work of popular history to whatever&amp;#039;s left of Joe Scarborough after Paul Krugman picks the rest out from between his teeth. Old friend of the blog Dan Kennedy does the honors of demonstrating that ol&amp;#039; Squint&amp;#039;s learned about as much about history as he&amp;#039;s learned about economics since his days plucking the banjo in the opening scenes of Deliverance. (The Stupid Sauce is particularly piquant when Scarborough spreads it over the remains of Dick &amp;quot;Southern Strategy And Count The Jews, Too&amp;quot; Nixon in an attempt to serve up the moldering corpse as a civil-rights hero. Somebody better find Rick Perlstein before someone gets hurt.) All I can add is that the Review has fallen on some pretty hard times when they have a story meeting and someone says, &amp;quot;We got this new book on Eisenhower and Nixon. Who should we get to review it?&amp;quot; And someone else says, &amp;quot;I know. How about that guy who runs the Morning Zoo on MSNBC? He&amp;#039;s really popular with the people who get drunk in front of the TV and pass out during Rachel&amp;#039;s show the night before.&amp;quot; And this is what you get for an author ID. Joe Scarborough is the host of MSNBC&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Morning Joe.&amp;quot; Lovely. They should let Barnicle review the next Royko anthology. Meanwhile, after pondering why the Times lets the janitorial staff sneak in and edit parts of the newspaper, we begin this week with Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party. Now, we are often tough on the Dancin&amp;#039; Master here, and we will get around to it again because he continues to have an economics crush on Carly (Clean Getaway) Fiorina, but, before we get around to the weekly accounting of his customary gobshitery, we have to throw him some props. His staff somehow having managed to pry the reclusive John McCain out of his desert cloister, Gregory nearly got McCain&amp;#039;s cranium to detonate. The topic, inevitably, was Benghazi, BENGHAZI!, BENGHAZI!!!!111111, and the Dancin&amp;#039; Master finally got around to asking the simple question of what in the hell McCain has been bellowing about for the last five months. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m asking you, a cover up of what?&amp;quot; And, well, boom goes the cerebellum.  &amp;quot;Do you care, David? Do you care, David? I&amp;#039;m asking you, do you care whether four Americans died? The reasons for that? And shouldn&amp;#039;t people be held accountable for the fact that four Americans died, including a very dear man?&amp;quot;  Far be it from me to correct the grammar of an elderly gentleman who&amp;#039;s clearly in the middle of an &amp;quot;episode,&amp;quot; but is McCain implying here that the other three Americans killed in the attack on the embassy were not &amp;quot;very dear men&amp;quot;? What does McCain mean by this? Why does he care less about the other three people who were killed? Why are they not &amp;quot;very dear&amp;quot; to him? THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DEMAND ANSWERS TO THIS!!!!!!!! One might think that this would be enough for the bookers to lose McCain&amp;#039;s phone number for a while, until tempers cool and the dosages are adjusted. I am not optimistic that this will be the case, however. We move now to This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, hosted on Sunday by Jonathan Karl. Karl and the gang invited Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin and the most recent first-runner-up in the Vice Presidential Pageant. Ryan would like you to know that he is still a Big Thinker on matters economic and that, as much as it pains him to say it, Math Itself demands that granny starve. But first, Karl managed to get him walking back over his own feet again. RYAN:...We are here because the president back in the last session of congress refused to cut spending in any place and therefore we wound up with the sequester. KARL: But Congressman, I&amp;#039;ve heard you say this and a talking point for Republicans for a long time. This was the president&amp;#039;s idea on and on and on, but let&amp;#039;s look at your own words. What you said right after the law putting this in place was passed in August of 2011. These are your words. You said &amp;quot;what conservatives like me have been fighting for, for years are statutory caps on spending, literally legal caps in law that says government agencies cannot spend over a set amount of money and if they breach that amount across the board sequester comes in to cut that spending. You can&amp;#039;t turn it out without a supermajority. We got that into law. Now it sounds to me there like if you weren&amp;#039;t taking credit for the idea of the sequester, you were certainly suggesting it was a good idea.  RYAN: So those are the budget caps on discretionary spending. Those occurred. We want those. Everybody wants budget caps. The sequester we&amp;#039;re talking about now was backing up the super committee. Remember the super committee in addition to those caps was supposed to come up with $1.2 trillion in savings. The Republicans on the super committee offered even higher revenues in exchange for spending cuts as part of that. It was rejected by the president and the Democrats. So no resolution occurred and therefore the sequester is occurring. And what we&amp;#039;ve always said is let&amp;#039;s cut spending in smarter ways to replace this sequester. Translation From The Original Weaselspeak: We wanted everything we wanted and then there was an election so we want everything that we wanted and some more. If there&amp;#039;s one thing Ryan and McCain have in common, it&amp;#039;s that, more than most people in Washington, they clearly believed their own hype to the point that it is inconceivable that their brilliance would be challenged in a public forum. That&amp;#039;s why McCain blew up at the Dancin&amp;#039; Master, and that&amp;#039;s why Ryan emitted this word cloud, and it&amp;#039;s also why Joe Biden was so effective by laughing at him. But, no, congressman, do continue. What is the goal that we&amp;#039;re trying to achieve here? We want economic growth. We want job creation. We want people to go back to work. We want to prevent a debt crisis from hurting those who are the most vulnerable in society from giving us a European-like economy.  Jesus, now he sounds as dumb as Lindsey Graham. What kind of &amp;quot;European-like economy&amp;quot;? Germany? Finland? I&amp;#039;ll take both of those, thanks. Is Iceland in Europe? (It was part of Europe on the Risk board, if I recall correctly.) I like their attitude toward bankers and the other kinds of people who buy Paul Ryan his wine with dinner over here. Ryan then spent a few minutes boldly denying that he wants to run for president. Given that he failed to carry his hometown, his congressional district, or his home state in the last election, but that he still carries the stench of Willard around, I find this completely unsurprising. Later, they rolled out the Political Super Duper Panel, which included N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer of civilization&amp;#039;s rules and Leader (perhaps) of the civilizing forces, as well as the Washington Post&amp;#039;s Ruth Marcus, scourge of potty-mouths everywhere. Both played their roles to perfection. Gingrich pretended he was smarter than every other human, and Marcus pretended she was a 200-year old nun. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter whose idea it was, what matters is the unthinkable is now inevitable. I&amp;#039;m going to give you my modest proposal for the sequester, which is we should take the relevant members of congress and the administration, put them on that stinky cruise ship and send them back out there.  The &amp;quot;stinky cruise ship&amp;quot;! Oh, my stars. Ruth is working blue! She is vexed and ratty \u2014 Two! Three! \u2014 over the way politics is being so...well...political that the necessary work of starving grannies is being delayed. It doesn&amp;#039;t touch most entitlements. So it hits two things very hard. It hits domestic spending which is already shrunken as the size of the economy to the levels of the Eisenhower administration and it hits defense spending effectively because you&amp;#039;re cramming it all into seven months, 9 percent of domestic spending, 13 percent cut in Defense spending. That&amp;#039;s not smart government.  Is it completely futile to try and get these people to remember that Social Security and Medicare are not &amp;quot;entitlements&amp;quot;? They are earned-benefit programs. If you&amp;#039;re going to steal money people have coming to them in order to keep troops in Europe in case Stalin comes back, you can at least be honest about it. Finally, we close out at Face The Nation, on which onetime Mogul Empire cricket correspondent Bob Schieffer made the capital mistake of inviting several people on his program who might very well know what they&amp;#039;re talking about, including new White House chief-of-staff Denis McDonough, who made the rounds yesterday. This does not include walking bag-of-unmarked-bills Haley Barbour, who dealt the usual cowflop about how the sequester was &amp;quot;the president&amp;#039;s idea,&amp;quot; and so on, rambling about The Deficit, and expressing concern for The Folks, which is rich coming from the former governor of America&amp;#039;s Basket Case. But the sequester and then the continuing resolutions at the end of March, these are the two times when the American people need to understand is there anybody in Washington serious about getting control of spending. Remember when the President proposed the sequester nearly two years ago, it was all about spending restraint. It didn&amp;#039;t have a thing to do with raising taxes.  Actually, it was about not allowing Tea Party nitwits to blow up the economy, which may have escaped former Governor Barbour, since his state doesn&amp;#039;t have an economy, only a well-organized system of rigged roulette wheels. Then, Bob had a chat with Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, and he made the critical mistake of using the word &amp;quot;scandals&amp;quot; in the same sentence with the word &amp;quot;Church,&amp;quot; but Wuerl was ready for him and blamed modern cinema and Madonna, I think. SCHIEFFER: What\u2014 what do you see as the major problems confronting whoever becomes the next pope? We&amp;#039;ve had these scandals in the church and all of that. CARDINAL DONALD WUERL: I think the real challenge that the\u2014 the church faces today and that the next pope will have to lead us in addressing is the overwhelming influence of secularism that&amp;#039;s\u2014 that&amp;#039;s really drowning out the voice of religion, the voice of faith. Each one of us is called to a relationship with God in whatever tradition we belong. We&amp;#039;re all called to that relationship. And we have to keep focusing on that. I think it&amp;#039;s going to be the task of the Pope to say there&amp;#039;s a spiritual mission, and that&amp;#039;s the work of the church. Oh, balls. The problem with the Church is that the influence of secularism \u2014 particularly of the secular apparatus of the law \u2014 has not been anywhere near overwhelming enough. It&amp;#039;s not Quentin Tarantino who&amp;#039;s drowning out the voice of your religion, it&amp;#039;s the moral outcry of millions of victims, the din of unexpiated sins. The problem with the Church is not a lack of faith, it&amp;#039;s the overabundance of crime. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17516/the-gobshites-and-the-stinky-cruise-ship/>