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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which, as we know, is what Wagner would have come up with if he&amp;#039;d determined to write something called Ride of the Buffet Grazers. Well, we knew it was going to be wall-to-wall zombie-eyed granny-starving on Sunday, and the Gobshites did not disappoint. We&amp;#039;ll get to them in a minute, but, first, we should preface our exercises this week by recalling the Single Greatest Factoid of 2012, especially now that the zombie-eyed granny-starver (ZEGS) in question is now lining himself up to be one sturdy Elder&amp;#039;s heartbeat from the presidency. Not too long ago, my buddy Draper wrote a piece about the battle of the super-PACs for the Times magazine and, buried within it, was this bit of choice, meaty goodness: [Bill] Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities [USA] informed a focus group that Romney supported the [Paul] Ryan budget plan \u2014 and thus championed &amp;quot;ending Medicare as we know it&amp;quot; \u2014 while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.  On second thought, that may be the best thing that ever happened to the Romney-ZEGS ticket. People simply don&amp;#039;t believe these two candidates are crazy enough to advocate what they advocate. We now have a new polling category: there&amp;#039;s approve, disapprove, no opinion, and Yeah, right, whatever, fk off. (And The New Republic Prize For Most Obsequious Performance As Even-The-Liberal goes to our old friends at the Boston Globe&amp;#039;s editorial page, for their forthright truckling to the policy genius of the Pericles of Janesville. Try to believe that the folks writing this haven&amp;#039;t spent the last three years in a coma. &amp;quot;The presence on the national ticket of Ryan, whose budget proposal goes farther than that of any other Republican in sketching out the tradeoffs necessary to make the sharp spending reductions many in the party seek [Ed. Note: he refuses to tell us what he&amp;#039;s cutting or what might be involved in his tax &amp;quot;reforms&amp;quot;] would serve as a kind of truth test for both sides. [Ed. Note: I may cough up a lung here.] A contest between Obama-Biden and Romney-Ryan would be less superficial \u2014 less derogatory and less likely to get mired in dubious assertions. [Ed. Note: If it weren&amp;#039;t for &amp;quot;dubious assertions,&amp;quot; Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; would be two pages long and mistaken for a pamphlet advertising a roadside reptile farm. They&amp;#039;re all trying to kill Paul Krugman, I&amp;#039;m telling you.] Nice work, kids.) Alas, to the roaring cheers of dozens, Dancin&amp;#039; Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party was back this week. He began with obvious anagram Reince Priebus, 33.3 percent of the Cheesehead Triple Whammy on which our politics is currently gorging itself, much to the detriment of its coronary arteries, I might add. (Twice-elected goggle-eyed homunculus Scott Walker will be along in a moment. Stay tuned.) There is a positive gift involved in completely ignoring a question, and, when the Dancing Master obliquely brought up the topic of zombie-eyed granny-starving, Reince appeared to be responding to the Swedish talk-show he was listening to in his ear.... DAVID GREGORY: Democrats might call that the rap sheet against Paul Ryan. How&amp;#039;s he going to handle this? REINCE PRIEBUS: Well, first of all, I think if you look at the president&amp;#039;s record, David. I mean let&amp;#039;s look at this. Wait a second. We&amp;#039;ve had a credit downgrade in this country. We had a president who promised he was going to carpet the world and delivered nothing. He said that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term and what did he do? He put us on a debt trajectory that is more than all of the debt accumulated before him combined. Carpet the world? I defy Priebus to find a video of the president promising to carpet the world. Okay, maybe the odd bathmat. Perhaps a throw rug here and there. (On Fox News, of course, this would be a prayer rug, facing Mecca, and they&amp;#039;d get a week&amp;#039;s worth of shows out of it.) But wall-to-wall orange shag, let&amp;#039;s say? Never happened. Why is Reince Priebus lying about the president, and about carpets? No flies on the Dancing Master, though; he knows when he&amp;#039;s being ignored.... DAVID GREGORY: But chairman \u2014 (OVERTALK) DAVID GREGORY: \u2014 I understand your position about the president, but I asked you about \u2014 and the Democrats are going to take the fight to Ryan&amp;#039;s record. You talked about governing. Well, Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s been in the House for 14 years. He has governed. These are his ideas, his plan. Evidently they&amp;#039;re Mitt Romney&amp;#039;s plans as well. REINCE PRIEBUS: Well, listen, I think that if you lay out the contrast and you lay out the choice of the American people, do you want to go down the road debt, decline and doubt? And, by the way, taking $700 billion out of Medicare as President Obama did. He stole $700 billion out of Medicare to fund European health care. Wait. What? WE&amp;#039;RE financing &amp;quot;European health care&amp;quot;? Whose? The Danes? The Norwegians? Those mooching Belgian bastards? No wonder people are pissed. First, we buy &amp;#039;em all carpets, and then we pay for their health care. Reince Priebus is one dependent clause away from being Art Bell. But the yarn didn&amp;#039;t get truly ripping until Reince was asked whether or not Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s trademark zombie-eyed granny-starving was also Mitt&amp;#039;s idea of zombie-eyed granny-starving. REINCE PRIEBUS: I think that Mitt Romney appreciates and admires the work and the ideas that Paul Ryan has done. But Mitt Romney has his own plan. The fact is I think these two gentlemen together are showing this country that they&amp;#039;re going to share a lot of ideas on how to get this country back on track. Translation From The Original Weaselspeak: We know that plan is political botulism. We&amp;#039;re winking at the nitwits in the base here. All evidence to the contrary, we&amp;#039;re not morons. Governor Scotty was up next. His appearance is best summed up by one passage in the official NBC transcript: GOV. SCOTT WALKER: \u2014 I think (UNINTEL PHRASE). But the Dancing Master was ready. DAVID GREGORY: \u2014 and I&amp;#039;ve got some tough questions for you too about Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s record... But I&amp;#039;m going to start with something else. And that&amp;#039;s a favorite of his is noodling, the sport of noodling. What is that, exactly? GOV. SCOTT WALKER: That&amp;#039;s an interesting one. You have to ask Paul a little bit more about that, but the nice thing about Paul, at least in our state, is we talk a lot about the Packers and we talk a lot about hunting in our state. He does a lot of both of those. And so in our area we&amp;#039;ve got the MVP in football and the MVP in sports. We&amp;#039;re hoping to have one of the MVPs, the next vice president of the United States, from Wisconsin as well. Jesus H. Christ bareassed in a cow-pond, Scotty, both Aaron Rodgers and Ryan Braun know what noodling is. It&amp;#039;s the sport whereby you catch river catfish with your bare hands. How in the hell did you get elected? Twice? Speaking of hauling slimy specimens out of the muck where they usually inhabit, it soon was time for Rich Lowry to shine on our panel. You may recall that, the last time a Republican nominee picked a running mate, Rich was momentarily indisposed, and groping for a moist towelette. On Sunday, though, apparently in the interim having determined the difference between Cinemax and C-SPAN, Rich was all business. He responded to the blandishments of kindly Doc Maddow with some well thought-out ahistorical gibberish while, elsewhere on the panel, the lump of cheese formerly known as Bill Bennett looked on in amazement because this was the first time he ever sat at a table with six people and there weren&amp;#039;t any chips stacked anywhere. Anyway, Rich chimed in about the tax-cuts that are an essential part of the overall zombie-eyed granny-starving plan.... RICH LOWRY: It&amp;#039;s based on a template, Rachel, of the Bowles-Simpson plan, which has been the subject of bipartisan acclaim, and the 1986 tax reform, which was one of the great bipartisan accomplishments in this town over the last 30 years. And if you study the effects of that &amp;#039;86 tax reform, which lowered rates and closed loopholes, it actually increased the share that the rich were paying. So this is not some fantasy. First of all, no. The Simpson-Bowles plan is not a plan. It was a list of proposals by two useless bits of aged Beltway flotsam that didn&amp;#039;t even have enough votes to pass the commission that bore their names. It has been the subject of &amp;quot;bipartisan acclaim&amp;quot; only by those who never were acclaimed much for partisanship in the first place. (Have I mentioned recently that Evan Bayh can pretty much bite me?) And, if Rich is going to cite the bipartisan genius of the 1986 tax-reform, he at least ought to mention, while arguing that it &amp;quot;increased the share that the rich are paying,&amp;quot; that the act dropped the top marginal rate from 50 percent to 28 percent, whence it has not risen more than five percent ever since. Yes, there were loopholes closed and, yes, briefly, ever so briefly, the wealthy paid a little more, but that was almost 30 years ago. The tax lawyers those people employ have had three decades to finagle their clients out of that nonsense and, I don&amp;#039;t personally care how fondly Bill Bradley looks back upon the deal, it was an accelerant to the shifting of the national wealth upward that continues to this day. And, anyway, even if it weren&amp;#039;t, you can&amp;#039;t compare Ryan&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; to it because, as was repeatedly pointed out to Rich, we don&amp;#039;t know what cuts and &amp;quot;reforms&amp;quot; are in the &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; because Paul Ryan won&amp;#039;t tell us. Now let us pause for a moment and answer the coming storm of horse-hockey about how the president wants to cut $700 million out of Medicare \u2014 it used to be $500 million back in the day \u2014 and that, therefore, zombie-eyed granny-starving is the only hope the program has. Almost all of these &amp;quot;cuts&amp;quot; are administrative in nature and not benefit cuts, which is why you hear Willard and his various mouthpieces talking merely about &amp;quot;cuts.&amp;quot; Medicare spending will continue to grow, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), but ACA will slow that growth. According to a report from the Kaiser Family Health Foundation over the next 10 years, the federal government will devote about $500 billion less to Medicare than it would have without ACA. CMS and the Kaiser Family Foundation tell ABC News that there will be no benefit cuts to Medicare. They say instead of Medicare&amp;#039;s being cut, there will be much more spending at the end of a 10-year window, but it does slow the rate of that growth. This is all unless Congress makes drastic changes to Medicare, for example passing House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s Medicare Plan. But the biggest difference is that, when the Affordable Care Act is fully in place, there will still be Medicare. Believe it or not, I&amp;#039;ll take a Democratic president&amp;#039;s word on that to that of a party that tried to strangle the program in its cradle, has been conniving its demise ever since, and has now nominated a vice-presidential candidate who believes that anyone receiving help from the government of any kind \u2014 except, apparently, himself in high school \u2014 is mired in dependency. The official Romney-ZEGS talking-points make the difference explicit: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have a bipartisan plan to strengthen Medicare by giving future seniors the choice between traditional Medicare and a variety of private plans. They are committed to ensuring that Medicare remains strong, not just for today&amp;#039;s seniors, but for tomorrow&amp;#039;s seniors as well. Oddly enough, the word &amp;quot;voucher&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#039;t appear there. Purely an oversight, I&amp;#039;m sure. Probably because Romney doesn&amp;#039;t even know what he pays for health care, and because Ryan&amp;#039;s been the beneficiary of a government-run, single-payer plan for at least the past 17 years, they don&amp;#039;t realize that what will happen is that the private insurers will cherry-pick the healthier seniors, whose &amp;quot;vouchers&amp;quot; in any case will be designed deliberately not to keep up with what the insurers undoubtedly will charge them. And then, the other seniors, the ones that are sick, the 70-year-old spouse trying to get health insurance for her 72-year old husband with Alzheimer&amp;#039;s, will get tossed into a resource-starved Medicare program that will be little more at that point than another welfare program, and we know how politically popular those are. The Ryan &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; is little more than the strategy Newt Gingrich devised 20 years ago to let Medicare &amp;quot;wither on the vine.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m sorry to disappoint everyone in the Beltway, but Uncle Ben has had more &amp;quot;new ideas&amp;quot; in the past 10 years than Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s had. However, the peanuttiest, creamiest cluster of fk in the land of gobshitery was spurned Veepster Tim Pawlenty, who after getting booted off the disco went on This Week With The Non-Reptilian Clinton Guy over on ABC and let a whole bunch of felines escape the burlap.... STEPHANOPOULOS: You did bring up the tax returns. How many years of tax returns did you provide to the Romney campaign? PAWLENTY: Well, I don&amp;#039;t know the exact number, George, but I \u2014 you know, there were several years, I believe. STEPHANOPOULOS: Several years. So more than two? PAWLENTY: Well, we don&amp;#039;t get into the details of the vetting process, but I \u2014 I gave them a bunch of tax returns. I don&amp;#039;t remember the exact number of years. Back on the roof, T-Paw. That&amp;#039;s such a monumental screw-up that it&amp;#039;s hard to believe Romney didn&amp;#039;t pick the guy. And, to conclude, from that same show, our regular morning daytime drama, The Strange Romance of Peggy Noonan: NOONAN: I&amp;#039;ll tell you what my anxiety is. It \u2014 this is how it looks to me. You sit and you \u2014 you listen to Paul Ryan talk about his economic general assumptions, theories, recommended way of operating. You listen to the other side. I think you hear the logic of Paul Ryan, and I think that&amp;#039;s fine. I&amp;#039;m just not sure that in a busy, bouncy, shallow, silly, electric popping, tweeting (inaudible) electoral environment that \u2014 that the Ryan case can be made.  And the dizzy dancing way she feels. --GREATEST HITS FROM THE POLITICS BLOG ON PAUL RYAN: \u2022 ON THE VP PICK: Paul Ryan, Murderer of Opportunity, Political Coward, Candidate for Vice President \u2022 Paul Ryan Is Not a Vice President. Paul Ryan Is a Fake. \u2022 Paul Ryan Is Faking It Until He Makes It \u2022 The Budget Kabuki and Our Too-Broken Government \u2022 A Man Who Looks Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s Storm Dead in the Eye \u2022 A Triumphant Paul Ryan Is a Tragedy for the Rest of Us \u2022 Ryan and Romney: A Marriage of Our Insane Times \u2022 This Is Not Our Beautiful House \u2022 Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s Budget Is a Cowardly Political Joke \u2022 The New Rights of Paul Ryan, CPAC&amp;#039;s Public Intellectual \u2022 Lyin&amp;#039; Paul Ryan and the End of Medicare \u2022 Paul Ryan Is Living in a Fantasy Land Older Than Ayn Rand \u2022 And So Begins the Great Paul Ryan Comeback \u2022 Paul Ryan and the New Politics of Sadism \u2022 State of the Union: Winning the Future, or Losing Our Mind? \u2022 ...and More PLUS: Tucker Carlson Interviews Paul Ryan for Esquire &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; (Click here to subscribe to The Politics Blog via RSS, plus to follow Charles P. Pierce on Twitter.) 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<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15303/paul-ryan-meet-the-press-11628365/>