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" CHARLOTTE, N.C. \u2014 Welcome back to our weekly (albeit delayed by one day) survey of the state of our National Dialogue, which is, of course, what Tchaikovsky would have come up with had he set out to write Goat Lake. My man Chuck Todd will remain my man Chuck Todd no matter what he says but, Lord above, when he came on my electric television set Monday morning with Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, the blog&amp;#039;s favorite politician, and started badgering Schweitzer about who was going to run in 2016, it took me a long moment to keep myself from looking at the TV and the window, and unleashing my inner Keith Moon. People who talk about the next election while the current one is still going on need very badly to go to Pundit Re-Education Camp to reclaim swampland and fight anopheles mosquitoes to a draw to keep yellow fever under control. We expect, alas, to take some casualties in all this but, I&amp;#039;m sorry, but there has to be a penalty for liking the Iowa straw poll that much. It was a very tough weekend on Dancin&amp;#039; Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party, wherein, apparently, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Tom Friedman constitute The Left. (Jesus, we draft worse than the Timberwolves do.) Tom Brokaw was there, too, possibly to make sure that the victims of Dutch Elm Disease were well-represented. They were tossed in against Newt Gingrich and Carly Fiorina, two conservative experts in destroying things, including their own respective political careers. (Fiorina&amp;#039;s got some sort of honorific with the Republican National Committee these days, giving her an office from which she can abuse the custodial help and hide from the demon sheep.) Anyway, that was your lineup for the morning&amp;#039;s jaw-fest and, inevitably, a glazed, cream-filled cluster of fk broke out. Gingrich kicked things off with the kind of balls-out lie that makes you wonder if his mother dipped him in the River Bullshit as a child, immunizing everything but his right ankle against attacks of conscience.... So, I mean, if he wants to set up a test between say, Reagan&amp;#039;s 1984 campaign where he didn&amp;#039;t mention Jimmy Carter, he didn&amp;#039;t explain the failure, he ran \u2014 it was called leadership that is working, was his title. I mean, wowser, and I thought Paul Ryan could sling it. Here&amp;#039;s Reagan himself, accepting the nomination at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas: Inflation was not some plague borne on the wind; it was a deliberate part of their official economic policy, needed, they said, to maintain prosperity. They didn&amp;#039;t tell us that with it would come the highest interest rates since the Civil War. As average monthly mortgage payments more than doubled, home building nearly ground to a halt; tens of thousands of carpenters and others were thrown out of work. And who controlled both Houses of the Congress and the executive branch at that time? Not us, not us. Campaigning across America in 1980, we saw evidence everywhere of industrial decline. And in rural America, farmers&amp;#039; costs were driven up by inflation. They were devastated by a wrongheaded grain embargo and were forced to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates just to get by. And many of them didn&amp;#039;t get by. Farmers have to fight insects, weather, and the marketplace; they shouldn&amp;#039;t have to fight their own government. He&amp;#039;s right, though. They don&amp;#039;t mention Carter. Ever. Not even last week, when Mitt Romney took a pop at him in his acceptance speech. I&amp;#039;m going to miss Newt when he goes back to his career as an ideological Ron Popeil. Brokaw responded by proving a) that he&amp;#039;s seen a movie some time in the last two decades, b) that he still recalls that presidents elected in 2008 did not take office until 2009, and c) that his lifetime membership in the Boring Centrist&amp;#039;s Society (David Broder Lodge No. 234) remains safe.... My own impression is, David, that out in the country, if anyone&amp;#039;s looking to give voice to the frustrations that are there, it would be Cuba Gooding, and Jerry Maguire,Show Me the Money. People feel a sense of betrayal after the last, not just last four years, but the last twelve years. They feel a sense that they&amp;#039;ve been buffaloed and that they can&amp;#039;t believe anything anymore because it always seems to be bait and switch. One quarter it&amp;#039;s going to get better. The next quarter, it&amp;#039;s worse. So I think that&amp;#039;s what both campaigns have to address this time.  Note to Tom: Romney is the bait. Ryan is the switch. Meanwhile, Fiorina was briefly distracted firing one of the camera crew, but rallied to praise Willard Romney&amp;#039;s desire to lay some pipe: The Keystone Pipeline. Romney talks about an all of the above energy policy and lays out crisp specifics. And one of those is to approve immediately the Keystone Pipeline. Most people estimate that would produce over a million jobs right there.  Holy mother of god, if you fed the people at TransCanada enough blotter acid to paralyze China, they wouldn&amp;#039;t claim that their pipeline is good for a million jobs. They started out claiming it would provide 20,000 jobs, and they had to walk even that back, because many of those jobs were temporary ones involving the construction of the pipeline, including entertaining the workers, and it really isn&amp;#039;t fair to count strippers that way. I mean, why not claim 10 million, or eleventy gozillion-infinity? What the hell does it matter? It&amp;#039;s not like Tom Friedman&amp;#039;s going to call her on it. He&amp;#039;s still waiting for America to elect David Cameron.... I think the American people really do want a plan. They want one from Romney. They want one from Obama. And I think they will reward someone who they feel has laid down a credible plan, and please, please, don&amp;#039;t tell me it isn&amp;#039;t going to hurt. There&amp;#039;s no way we get out of this hole without working. They want it to be real. They want it to be fair. The wealthy pay more. Everybody pays something. And they want it to be aspirational. They want it to be not just about balancing the budget, but making this country great. Yes, Granny, when you eat that catfood, you&amp;#039;re doing it for America. And it&amp;#039;s important to remember that, in a very real relative sense, nobody on this panel is going to feel any &amp;quot;hurt&amp;quot; at all. Tom Friedman is pleading for austerity on your behalf, people. You need to thank him. Face The Nation, hosted by former Arthur Administration White House correspondent Bob Schieffer, had the weekend&amp;#039;s biggest &amp;quot;get&amp;quot; when Maryland Governor Martin O&amp;#039;Malley answered the world&amp;#039;s dumbest question badly, and gave every member of the gubba-gubba-gubba brigade something to gubba-gubba about for two days. BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you that. Can you honestly say that people are better off today than they were four years ago?  GOVERNOR MARTIN O&amp;#039;MALLEY: No, but that&amp;#039;s not the question of this election. The question, without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us the Bush job losses, the Bush recession, the Bush deficits, the series of desert wars, charged for the first time to credit cards, the national credit card... See that &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; there? That&amp;#039;s the only thing the assembled punditocracy down here talked about on Monday. (The Obama campaign spent the last 36 hours fashioning a response.) But, even though it traces itself back to St. Reagan, it&amp;#039;s still the world&amp;#039;s dumbest question. It&amp;#039;s the world&amp;#039;s dumbest question because it always has only one answer. The answer to it is, always: some people are and some people are not. Surely, American soldiers who might have died in Iraq are better off, as are all possible victims of Osama bin Laden, and as are a whole passel of American autoworkers. People who got new roads out of the stimulus are better off, as are all those people who got the tax cuts with which the Republicans insisted on larding the stimulus package. It also is always the world&amp;#039;s dumbest question because it&amp;#039;s a backdoor way of asking people, &amp;quot;How do you feel about things these days?&amp;quot; In the current context, it is the Republicans asking a bunch of what Huckleberry Graham called &amp;quot;angry white men&amp;quot; how they feel about the fact that the black president is handing welfare checks out to lazy blackity-black people while your Uncle Knocko can&amp;#039;t get you on the county road crew any more, probably because your state&amp;#039;s Republican governor shed a couple hundred thousand state jobs so he could give a tax break to that chemical company that moved to Mississippi anyway. But I digress. We conclude with the gang over at This Week With The Clinton Guy Who Was Shocked By Blowjobs. Matthew Dowd pronounced himself completely bumfuzzled by the level of lying weaselhood attained by the acceptance speech delivered by zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin.... What happened at this convention is that nobody is calling [Republicans] on it. Paul Ryan, what he did in his speech, I think so stretched the truth \u2014 and I like Paul Ryan and I have a lot of respect for Paul Ryan \u2014 but the elements of what he said, closing the GM plant, which closed before Barack Obama took president [sic], about the Simpson-Bowles bill, which he opposed and you see, all of the sudden, he faults Barack Obama for... It some point, the truth should matter... When anybody that was watching that, that didn&amp;#039;t know the facts of it, anybody watching that speech \u2014 just like the welfare thing \u2014 anybody coming away from that believes one thing.... He was trying to say Barack Obama was responsible the closing of the GM plant and that isn&amp;#039;t true. Hi, I&amp;#039;m Matthew Dowd. I spent years selling a manifest incompetent to the nation as its president. I spent years enabling a bungling cementhead. If our pet war hadn&amp;#039;t gone wrong, I&amp;#039;d still be doing it. But it went bad, and thousands of people died, and the man I worked for managed to make such a shambles of everything he touched that even his brother didn&amp;#039;t mention him by name last week. I have a few discreet splotches of blood on my hands still, but I&amp;#039;d like my relevance back now, please. Sorry, Matthew. Off to the swamps with you. Say hello to the cottonmouths. CLICK HERE FOR LIVE COVERAGE FROM THE DNC IN CHARLOTTE WITH CHARLES P. PIERCE, TOM JUNOD &amp;amp;amp; MARGARET DORIS &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15572/sunday-talk-shows-labor-day-weekend-12353315/>