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"  Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which is what Gilbert and Sullivan would have come up with, had they composed the operetta, The Pissants Of Penzance. It is rare in this department that we largely ignore the efforts of both The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs and those of former Tang Dynasty Interior correspondent Bob Schieffer but, this week, at Dancin&amp;#039; Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party, there was such an outright lap dance in and around the midsection of the American plutocracy that it deserves almost an entire installment by itself. Surely, for himself and his posterity, David Gregory has sewn up an invitation to every barbecue on Martha&amp;#039;s Vineyard unto the next century. That David Brooks also was there, serving as a kind of centerpiece, certainly could have come as no surprise. One has to fill up those vast spaces for entertaining in Cleveland Park somehow. After a brief period of fretting about the state of the Levant, during which Brooks bestirred himself from amid the radishes to opine that things could have been a lot worse, except that they weren&amp;#039;t, and that the president should continue to embolden the &amp;quot;the non-Islamists in the Arab world, including in Iran, across the region.&amp;quot; (Including the ones in Iran? Isn&amp;#039;t that why Reagan sold those missiles to the mullahs back in the &amp;#039;80s, when David Brooks wasn&amp;#039;t watching?) (Also, the Dancin&amp;#039; Master essayed a thought that had a red flag the size of the left field wall in Fenway fluttering above it, &amp;quot;You know, I read something this week, Robert Kagan wrote...&amp;quot; There was a low whistle and I passed out briefly, but not before I heard wild laughter coming from everybody who actually knew something about the Middle East.) Once these preliminaries were out of the way, we moved on to some serious Grand Bargain talk, in which the Dancin&amp;#039; Master once again cued up &amp;quot;King Of Pain&amp;quot; for the benefit of millions of people around the country whom he will never meet in his life. He brought on as his wing person career failure Carly Fiorina, for whom I think Oliver Stone might well have written the line in Wall Street, &amp;quot;If (she) owned a funeral parlor, nobody would die.&amp;quot; As a CEO, she cratered Hewlett-Packard and walked away rich. As a senatorial candidate in California, she lost after running one of the dumbest television ads in American political history. Her most recent triumph was as the vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee which, you may recall, was such a resounding success a couple of weeks ago. Nobody with a brain would buy an apple from this woman at this point, but she wants the simple folk to &amp;quot;share the sacrifice,&amp;quot; so she&amp;#039;s on the Dancin&amp;#039; Master&amp;#039;s A-list. Well, first of all, I think there will be probably an agreement on tax rates for the millionaires and billionaires, which is what President Obama campaigned on. Of course, now what he&amp;#039;s talking about is a family of four making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And if you&amp;#039;re living in the tri-state area or Washington, DC, you don&amp;#039;t feel like a millionaire at that rate. I think we should be also talking at the same time about closing loopholes because it helps simplify the tax code. And simplifying the tax code is critical if we want to restore small business creation and entrepreneurship in this country and we also have to be talking about where is it we&amp;#039;re going to cut spending. It&amp;#039;s a critical part of our fiscal problems. It&amp;#039;s not just a 30-day tax deal. It is we need to make a down payment on revenue, yes, but we need to make a down payment on government reform and tax reform as well. Do we need to mention that most of the country does not live in &amp;quot;the Tri-State Area or Washington D.C.&amp;quot;? And I would like to know where Ms. Fiorina stands on the mortgage-interest deduction vis-\u00E0-vis the carried-interest deduction. I mention this because there is very little else I care to know on the state of the nation&amp;#039;s economy from a woman who would screw up a two-car funeral if you spotted her the hearse. Nevertheless, we continue. The Dancin&amp;#039; Master was quick to show his appreciation for the tune coming from the Fiorina Concertina Of Fail. If everyone has to take their castor oil \u2013 the rich more, the middle class some \u2014 make them feel that it will enable us to all get stronger. Make them feel that we&amp;#039;re embarking on a new journey \u2014 not to punish but to solve, not to sock it to the successful but to create more abundance for all.&amp;quot; A sense of some civic duty. Well, at least the castor-oil is covered under Obamacare. The fact that the Dancin&amp;#039; Master is quoting Tom Friedman on this makes it worse, not better. There is not a single proposal under serious discussion of which I am aware that would bring the slightest amount of significant &amp;quot;pain&amp;quot; to either Gregory or Friedman, but there are dozens that will make the lives of middle-class and poor Americans more difficult. Let Friedman and Gregory live for a week on Social Security. Let them live an hour on food stamps or unemployment benefits. Then let them preach civic duty to the people who pay their honoraria,or to the people who actually collapsed the economy, and not to the millions of people out in the country who are struggling to get by on what clowns like these tip the valet. Ken Burns was on the panel, and talked about not &amp;quot;kicking the can down the road,&amp;quot; and was a very nice man and about as out of place on this show as he would have been jumping center for the Bulls. There were some more moral correction called for, and the Squire Of Cleveland Park was there to provide it. BROOKS: We are one budget deal away from being the hot spot of the world. Europe is in the toilet. China&amp;#039;s growth has fallen down. Middle East is going backwards. We have a lot of potential for fracking from innovation. We&amp;#039;re one step away. If we get this \u2014 if we can prove our nation as governable, we are really the golden spot in the world and the way you do that \u2014 first, the Republicans have some homework to do. They got to figure out which taxes do we least want to oppose and so that&amp;#039;s rates, that&amp;#039;s capital gains or that&amp;#039;s deductions. I think they&amp;#039;re going to end up with capital ends. They&amp;#039;re going to say, okay, we&amp;#039;ll raise that, we&amp;#039;ll get the revenue that way. But the president has homework too. His posture on spending has been very passive, I&amp;#039;m all ears, you give me what you&amp;#039;ve got. You got to (Unintelligible) together. The Republicans will not give on taxes unless the president is aggressive and leads on spending. And so \u2014 but if they can get that done and prove just in this next couple of months, we&amp;#039;re governable, we really are in a golden position to go forward and do bigger things. Glory be, where does he buy his mushrooms? Did he leave his coherence in his other suit? What in the name of John Maynard Keynes&amp;#039;s left nut is this man talking about? We manage to get our oligarchs to cough up enough to get back to where the top rates were under Clinton, and close some loopholes that their tax lawyers will reopen in 15 minutes, while simultaneously screwing the middle-class with its pants on for the next 20 years, and, suddenly, we&amp;#039;re back atop the Big Rock Candy Mountain? And how in hell did fracking get in there? No time to ponder this, because there&amp;#039;s another plutocrat&amp;#039;s apple to polish. Here&amp;#039;s David Cotes, the CEO of Honeywell, who doesn&amp;#039;t believe corporations should pay any taxes, come aboard to talk about bargaining grandly. COTES: Right now, I&amp;#039;m not that bullish at all. And, in fact, I&amp;#039;d say there&amp;#039;s a great uncertainty that&amp;#039;s just hanging over the entire economy because we&amp;#039;re not confident that our guys can govern anymore. We&amp;#039;ve got 536 independent contractors all talking about the significance of jobs, but the one thing that they could do that would remove that uncertainty and create this job growth we&amp;#039;d all like, they&amp;#039;re not doing. And there&amp;#039;s a couple of stumbling blocks. It&amp;#039;s not just taxes. We have a significant problem with entitlements. Medicare, Medicaid in \u2014 in particular. Those things need to get resolved together. If we could actually develop a four trillion dollar credible market credible plan that would cause everyone out there to say, wow, we can govern again. Well, that will certainly come as some comfort to the sick people, and the old people, and the poor people who will by dying somewhere out of David Cotes&amp;#039;s line of sight, while Cotes and his running buddies  try to shelter even more of their profits. This is now how &amp;quot;governing&amp;quot; is defined by our elites, which definitely include the likes of David Gregory and most of the people on this panel. Cotes is the kind of person with whom Fiorina, and Gregory, and Mrs. Greenspan, and Tom Friedman all identify. He is they, and they are he, and they are all together. So much so that when Cotes decided, screw it, I&amp;#039;ll just throw out some total bullshit... COTES: But people like me just aren&amp;#039;t hiring now because we&amp;#039;re not confident they can do it. ...nobody moved a muscle. (Mr. Cote isn&amp;#039;t hiring because it&amp;#039;s more profitable for him to sit on a big pile of money and, if necessary, hire someone overseas to do some work at 85 cents a week. None of this is hard to figure out.) He then moved on to the latest scam \u2014 Fix The Debt, whereby a bunch of CEO&amp;#039;s pretend to be interested in solving the national debt while simultaneously guaranteeing that their tax rates will continue to be a disgrace to an evolved democracy. And if you take a look at what we&amp;#039;ve been able to do with our fix the debt camp \u2014 the campaign to fix the debt, that&amp;#039;s a group of CEOs who have gotten together, an ad hoc group were not part of any other organization, and we&amp;#039;ve raised about 40 million dollars just to be driving this point that it&amp;#039;s tax reform that raises more revenue, and it&amp;#039;s entitlement reform, the ticking time bomb that&amp;#039;s going to kill us and we&amp;#039;ve got to do all this at one time. So we are very supportive of the president being able to get something like this done. It&amp;#039;s vitally important for our economy. Tax reform, not tax increases, raises more revenue. But reforming &amp;quot;entitlements&amp;quot; \u2014 neither Social Security nor Medicare is an &amp;quot;entitlement,&amp;quot; by the way \u2014 is also important. Why would we listen to people like this guy? Why would we listen to people like Carly Fiorina? Why do David Gregory and NBC think they have anything important to add to the discussion? Were all the labor leaders gone off fishing somewhere? Where are the jobs in all of this? Where is the solution to the yawning gap in pay equity and stagnant family incomes? What happened to Al Sharpton? Did someone hide him under the table? Whoops, no, here he is. This is about fairness. Why do we need to deal with the tax on the rich first? Because we must assure Americans we&amp;#039;re dealing with fairness. We keep talking about shared sacrifice, there was not shared wealth and shared prosperity. So you&amp;#039;re asking people that didn&amp;#039;t enjoy the good times to share in paying for the tab that they never enjoyed. My dear fellow, that is not the way we do things in Cleveland Park. BROOKS: You can&amp;#039;t cut \u2014 you can&amp;#039;t tax your way through a budget deal. You have to do it both ways. You can&amp;#039;t take the country off the fiscal cliff. First \u2014 because you just can&amp;#039;t control it. You don&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s going to happen in the world if we have another budget crisis. It could be cataclysmic. Second, you can&amp;#039;t humiliate the Republicans on your way to a deal. You have to give them a pathway to yes. And the pathway to yes is some basic structural reform of Medicare, tie it with the tax increase for the rich. That&amp;#039;s the deal. Everybody knows it&amp;#039;s the deal. It&amp;#039;s doing it in a respectful way that actually gets you there. They asked for &amp;quot;a pathway to yes&amp;quot; during the election. They made the request quite plainly. The country laughed at them. There is no reason to &amp;quot;reform&amp;quot; Medicare, of which David Brooks will never, ever need to avail himself, as some kind of blood offering to the nitwits currently scrubbing Grover Norquist&amp;#039;s fingerprints off their dicks. And, to wrap things up in a nice bow, the Queen Of Fail came back with the real problem with the economy \u2013 those greedy bastards who teach school and plow snow. FIORINA:..And, look, I \u2014 let us accept Reverend Al&amp;#039;s point and the president&amp;#039;s point about fairness. But equally it is not fair that public employee union pensions and benefits are so rich now that cities and states are going bankrupt and college tuition is going up 25 and 30 percent or police and firefighters are being cut. There&amp;#039;s a lot that isn&amp;#039;t fair right now. When she wrecked HP, thousands of people lost their jobs. Think a few of them might have had to go on unemployment? Or on food stamps? Or both? Where was her concern for state and municipal budgets then? If the Dancin&amp;#039; Master wanted to give the country a good look at how rigged the game is, was, and if most of his honored guests have their way, always will be, then he couldn&amp;#039;t have done better than yesterday&amp;#039;s show. A couple of minutes longer, and Carly might have tucked a C-note into his waistband. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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