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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which, as we know, sounds like what Joseph Haydn would have come up with had he composed Symphony in Asia Minor. Before we get to the usual exercises in gobshitery, in which, this week especially, the Dancin&amp;#039; Master found himself punching way, waaayyyyy above his weight class, let me give you a short exercise in Ignorning Maureen Dowd. Here is the beginning of her column yesterday: Now you know what Thanksgiving with my family is like. Holy power saw of Jesus, no. Just, no. I don&amp;#039;t care to know what Thanksgiving is like amid the staggering, belching, bloviating Hibernian mucksavages to whom you are related. I grew up with a couple of thousands of Dowds, many of them with daughters quite like Maureen, actually, and I have no desire to revisit, even vicariously, somebody&amp;#039;s personal Holy Name Society of the Mind. There are a million reason why we should all be grateful that Neil Simon grew up Jewish. This is just one of them.  Anyway, we actually do have to start with Dancin&amp;#039; Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party, if only because they trotted out Tom Brokaw, The Man Who Invented World War II, to act all saddened that Everything Has Come to This.... BROKAW: Talking to both campaigns, they thought that \u2014 that the vice presidential race was probably a draw on substance, but the Republicans think that Joe Biden&amp;#039;s kind of over the top behavior helped them because the country is not happy with the division in politics and the lack of respect that one shows to the other. Okay, I don&amp;#039;t know a single Democrat who thinks that debate was &amp;quot;a draw on substance.&amp;quot; (Paul Ryan may never get that answer on Afghanistan off the bottom of his shoe.) But the fact that Tom was able to convey the terrible sadness afflicting Republicans over the divisions in the country and the lack of respect that political opponents show each other, all without having his tongue turn to flame \u2014 well, that just means there is no god. Proving my point was the presence on the panel of Alex Castellanos, the genius behind the most racist TV ad of the last half of the 20th century, next to whom Brokaw seemed more than happy to sit, clucking away in his voice made of denim about the awful incivility afflicting our politics. Castellanos proceeded that he hasn&amp;#039;t lost all his skills at prevarication by citing a beloved piece of meretricious history.... John F. Kennedy cut taxes and raised revenue because of the growing economy. First of all, no, he didn&amp;#039;t. It was LBJ who got the tax cut passed after Kennedy&amp;#039;s murder and, when he did, the top rate was still 77 percent. If we go back to that, I think we can all have a deal tomorrow. But, of course, there won&amp;#039;t be anywhere near enough suffering out in the country to suit millionnaire suits like Brokaw and the Dancin&amp;#039; Master... MR. BROKAW: So \u2014 so I was just going to say I talked to a lot of major business leaders who want Romney to get elected, but almost to a man and a woman, they say \u2014 but you know what, we&amp;#039;re going to have to pay some more taxes in our category. What they want to do, however, is to benchmark them against spending cuts so that they can get spending down to 20 percent of GDP. There&amp;#039;s going to have to be a combination in their judgment. And these are private business leaders who run big companies, and entrepreneurial people. Oh, balls. &amp;quot;Major business leaders&amp;quot; want their taxes cut, and their jobs off-shore, and their employees as powerless as possible. That Tom Brokaw still has faith in the essential patriotism of our ownership class makes me desperately want to go into the aluminum siding business in South Dakota. GREGORY: They&amp;#039;re not \u2014 they&amp;#039;re not burdened by these ideological fights. Often they&amp;#039;ll say look we don&amp;#039;t care. Of course, they&amp;#039;re not &amp;quot;burdened by these ideological fights,&amp;quot; you twit. They&amp;#039;ve already won most of them, and they&amp;#039;ve pretty much bought off the referees in the ones that are still going on. But the real delight came later when the Dancin&amp;#039; Master sat down with Stephen Colbert and pretty much got played like a $5 tin piano. GREGORY: America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We \u2014 We Never Weren&amp;#039;t... MR. COLBERT: es. GREGORY: ...at a time when that you write about America&amp;#039;s perfect, now we should change it. MR. COLBERT: We have to fix it. GREGORY: We have to fix it. GREGORY: Right. MR. COLBERT: Okay. Because \u2014 because America is an exceptional country. GREGORY: Why did you have to have a book by the way? MR. COLBERT: What? GREGORY: Why \u2014 why write another book here? I mean, you&amp;#039;ve written others. MR. COLBERT: You obvious \u2014 you obviously haven&amp;#039;t read it if you have to ask that question. Hey, Homer. &amp;quot;Iliad&amp;quot; was good. Why write &amp;quot;The Odyssey&amp;quot;? Hey God, why two testaments? One was fine. Really? Elsewhere down the dial, ABC had Jake (Blood &amp;#039;n Guts) Tapper sitting in for The Clinton Aide Who Was Horrified By Blowjobs, and there was a sprawling panel discussion of debates that included not merely some of the usual idiots \u2014 George Effing Will was on hand, trying to pretend he didn&amp;#039;t help Reagan cheat during a debate in 1980 \u2014 and also Martha Raddatz, who apparently managed to get Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s flopsweat out of her clothes in time to make the show. There was also N. Leroy Gingrich, Definer Of Civilization&amp;#039;s Rules And Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces, because it was Sunday and he&amp;#039;s every teenage booker&amp;#039;s idea of a Smart Person, and because he seems not yet to be aware that he finished third in what was the most comical primary field ever thrown across the landscape by a major political party. GINGRICH: Well, my wife, Callista, kept saying that if he were as prepared and as aggressive with Obama as he was \u2014 you know, the two debates that were life-and-death for him, he won, in terms of -- I won a lot of debates. When it finally got down to the crunch, he did what he had to do. He was very aggressive. He was very assertive. Richard Norton Smith, a famous presidential historian who&amp;#039;s known more of them than most people have, chimed in with an insight that he mined from the depths of 1975.... That clip from &amp;quot;Saturday Night Live&amp;quot; makes the point. In 1960, we had a shared experience. Close to half the population sat down. It was the first time that this had ever happened. Novelty was \u2014 was a huge factor. We had a lot fewer intermediaries interpreting what we were seeing. We saw it for ourselves. And the next day, we discussed it at the water cooler. &amp;quot;Saturday Night Live&amp;quot; has become our water cooler. Not since Farley died, chief. However,since most of the rest of the panel was about various SNL clips, and how various candidates were treated on that show, we can conclude nothing except that ABC is not yet over the failure of Fridays or Saturday Night With Howard Cosell. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16273/stephen-colbert-meet-the-press-13747410/?src=rss>