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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which is, of course, what Lou Reed would have come up with had he written Squawk On The Piled Hides. So this happened over the weekend. The wave of blasts, which hit Shia Muslim-majority areas in and around the Iraqi capital on Sunday, also wounded more than 120 people, the security and medical officials said. One of the worst-hit neighbourhoods was Shaab in north Baghdad, where two car bombs exploded in a commercial area, killing at least five people and wounding at least 17. Blasts also struck the areas of Bayaa, Baladiyat, Mashtal, Hurriyah and Dura in Baghdad, and Saba al-Bur near Baghdad. Sunni Muslim fighters often carry out attacks targeting members of Iraq&amp;#039;s Shia majority. Violence in Iraq has reached a level not seen since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a sectarian conflict. In a related development, Richard Cheney, truthless war criminal and murderous coward, was allowed a chunk of time on This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs which, alas for the world, is not broadcast live from The Hague. CHENEY: I don&amp;#039;t have a lot of confidence in the administration to be able to negotiate an agreement. I think sanctions offer some prospect of bringing the Iranians around. I&amp;#039;ve talked to my friends in that part of the region. I still know them, a lot of them, and they&amp;#039;re very fearful that the whole Iranian exercise is going to go the same way as the Syrian exercise, that is, that there will be bold talk from the administration. But in the final analysis, nothing effective will be done about the Iranian program. Certainly nothing as effective as Cheney&amp;#039;s program vis a vis Iraq, which was to lie this country into a war that is still killing people.  CHENEY: Well, I think the U.S. presence in the Middle East was enormously important now for decades, going all the way back certainly before Desert Storm. I think that presence and that capability and that influence has been significantly diminished as we have withdrawn from the region. We&amp;#039;ve cut the number of forces we have in the region. I think our friends no longer count on us, no longer trust us and our adversaries don&amp;#039;t fear us. That was sort of the cornerstone and the basis of the U.S. ability and influence. If we&amp;#039;re not heavily involved there, if we&amp;#039;ve turned our back on the region, if we&amp;#039;ve had a president who believes we overreacted to the terrorism attacks on 9/11, I think the Saudis, the Emirates, the Egyptians, many in that part of the world no longer have confidence in the United States. STEPHANOPOULOS: You&amp;#039;ve said you&amp;#039;d advised President Bush to take out Syria&amp;#039;s nuclear -- CHENEY: I did. STEPHANOPOULOS: -- reactor.   Not even a pliable tool like C-Plus Augustus was bloodthirsty enough for this monstrous flesh-bag of evil. The country did not make enough war in enough places to suit his multiply deferred ass. What question is left for The Clinton Guy to ask? &amp;quot;How long have you been this much of a sociopath?&amp;quot;? The mind boggles.  CHENEY: I thought it would be important if we took out the Syrian reactor, that it would send a very important signal to the Iranian program, that we&amp;#039;d drawn a red line. We&amp;#039;d said to North Korea, don&amp;#039;t proliferate, after their first test. They clearly proliferated and we didn&amp;#039;t do anything about it. And if we had taken out the Syrian reactor the way the Israelis did, and they wanted us to do it, we would have sent a clear signal about proliferation. We would have given substance and meaning to our diplomacy. The Iranians would have to look at that and say, these guys are serious about it. They mean business and we&amp;#039;d be much more effective today negotiating with the Iranians if we&amp;#039;d taken out that Syrian reactor seven years ago. STEPHANOPOULOS: Is military action against Iran inevitable? CHENEY: I have trouble seeing how we&amp;#039;re going to achieve our objective short of that. And I doubt very much that the diplomacy will be effective if there&amp;#039;s not the prospect that, if diplomacy fails, that we will, in fact, resort to military force.  I missed that section of Article I which says the United States should make war if the vice-president feels it necessary to wave his dick at the world. My bad. The Clinton Guy should be ashamed. ABC should be ashamed. Hell, the human race should be ashamed. Giving any further airtime to this man that doesn&amp;#039;t take place in front of one tribunal or another -- much less, getting him on there and simply letting him spout the way ABC did -- is a crime against humanity. Richard Cheney is the least excusable American human being of the last half-century. That should at least be acknowledged. More to the point, he&amp;#039;s mindnumbingly, crashingly stupid, less trustworthy around facts than he is around a shotgun. If ABC wants to do an15-minute infomercial for war crimes, it needs better production values and a casting director. On the non-psycho-killer front, a lot of the talk was about the scandalous -- SCANDALOUS!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!! -- developments in Rollout-ghazi-gate. (I&amp;#039;m am starting to hear now from people who enrolled via the 1-800 number and who had no trouble at all. This should give pause to our young techie liberal friends with their cadillac health plans about the &amp;quot;honesty&amp;quot; of their superheated criticism. Yep, Ezra, it&amp;#039;s called a telephone. Ask your grandpa.) Over at Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party, the Dancin&amp;#039; Master hosted lying cheese-wheel Alex (Black Hands) Castellanos, who proceeded to lie about the entire social safety net. In this, he was aided, through the curious policies of the NBC News booking staff, by failed politician -- and soon-to-be-failed movie mogul -- Rick Santorum, and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is?  ALEX CASTELLANOS: There&amp;#039;s the lesson here. And what we&amp;#039;re seeing is the collapse and failure of big old dumb top-down hierarchical government in Washington. This is factory-style government from another age. It can do big simple things but it can&amp;#039;t deal with the complexities of an adaptive modern society. And if Obamacare was an anomaly, that would be one thing. But tell me something that Washington is doing a good job at. Education? A disaster. Social Security? It&amp;#039;s bankrupt, a Ponzi scheme. Name something Washington is doing well. It can&amp;#039;t manage its fiscal-- (OVERTALK) ALEX CASTELLANOS: David Axelrod made a point not long ago. He said, &amp;quot;Look, part of the problem of being president is that government is so vast you can&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s going on underneath it.&amp;quot; The Democrats&amp;#039; answer seems to be expand it. FMR. SEN. RICK SANTORUM: More and more. ALEX CASTELLANOS: That&amp;#039;s the wrong answer.  That&amp;#039;s your Age Of Austerity right there, folks. A ratfking political consultant lying in tandem with a career vaginophobe who hasn&amp;#039;t won an election in almost a decade, and both of them worthy of airtime that could have been better spent selling blenders or ThighMasters. And the host largely hors de combat because what does he care about anyone he can&amp;#039;t see from the veranda on The Vineyard. Well played, NBC. And we conclude in the climes of (relatively) sweet reason over on CBS, where former military correspondent to the court of Robert The Bruce, Bob Schieffer, completed the Great Circle Of Wingnut by hosting Darrell Issa, and managing to conduct an interview despite the distractions provided by the sound of CBS technicians&amp;#039;s padding the walls of the studio. Sit there, Darrell, try not commit fraud, and tell us what&amp;#039;s on your mind. REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Well, you know, you&amp;#039;ve had me on before asking about full confidence in Eric Holder. This President has to understand this was his signature legislation. They had-- they voted it on a purely partisan basis, but they had unlimited money, six hundred million dollars, just to do this part, and billions to do the other part. The President has been poorly served in the implementation of his own signature legislation. So if somebody doesn&amp;#039;t leave and if there isn&amp;#039;t a real restructuring, not just a sixty-day somebody come in and-- and try to fix it, then he&amp;#039;s missing the point of management one-o-one, which is these people are to serve him well and they haven&amp;#039;t.  Guess what, dickweed? Eric Holder&amp;#039;s still there. The &amp;quot;six hundred million&amp;quot; business is an easily debunked lie -- so easily debunked, in fact, that Glenn Beck&amp;#039;s shop did it -- and the president isn&amp;#039;t going to take your advice. But, if you want to go on TV and get slapped around again by Elijah Cummings, well, that&amp;#039;s your business. Later, though, in a discussion about the latest book on the JFK assassination -- Conclusion: Oswald was a Commie bastard who did it, but the CIA and the FBI and the entire government lied their asses off about what they knew about him because freedom -- Schieffer uttered the most terrifying sentence in all of punditdom: We&amp;#039;re going to bring in Peggy Noonan and Bob Woodward into this discussion.  No, grandpa! No, stop! Bad people on TV! PEGGY NOONAN: Well, it&amp;#039;s a heck of a story. We are over fifty years-- we are half a century into the story, and we are still learning new things about it, which is kind of amazing. But I also wondered, as I mentioned a moment ago, I wonder if we were not as a fully functioning nation lucky not to know all of this at the time. You wonder how destabilizing it would have been to have known of the grave doubts and the mischief and in some cases, the dishonesty of people who were running the United States and who were running the great report of the tragically killed President. So, in a way, I mean it&amp;#039;s the opposite of these days where we know everything, and that has its own destabilizing effect. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned as a child. Then, I discovered Grey Goose. Sooner or later, though, these shows are just going to drop the pretense and round up winos on the street to fill out the panels. Democracy would be much better served. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19698/the-gobshites-invite-a-monster-in/>