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" Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what George and Ira Gershwin would have come up with, had they composed &amp;quot;Embraceable Ewe.&amp;quot; Facing ratings that have been heading south more reliably than the autumn geese, NBC once again employed The Driftglass Protocol as regards Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party. They found another semi-major international sporting event -- the French Open tennis final -- to run instead. Rafa Nadal over John McCain? I&amp;#039;ll take that swap every week and twice on, well, Sunday. So it was left to The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, and to former Chinese Gordon embed Bob Schieffer, to carry the Bergdahlian gobshitery load -- and I do mean &amp;quot;load&amp;quot; -- this weekend, and they were both up to the task. Old Boston pal Martha Raddatz was shocked -- SHOCKED! -- to learn that many of her fellow citizens had lost their freaking minds. Again. RADDATZ: It was after an escape attempt that Bergdahl was kept in a small metal cage in the dark, according to a senior official. But his physical recovery is going well, The New York Times saying he has problems only with his skin and gums. Yet a senior official says the 28-year-old soldier is not yet mentally prepared to see his parents and he has no idea the firestorm his release has created. It is hard to believe that just over a week ago, Bowe Bergdahl&amp;#039;s parents were celebrating. This morning, there have been threats against the family&amp;#039;s lives. Hundreds of emails and phone calls, the threat so serious the FBI has been called in, one saying &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d be ashamed to say he is from your town. Needs to be shot and his dad right along with him. Taliban lovers.&amp;quot; The ugly turn of events happened quickly for a variety of reasons. First, the circumstances of his capture. This week, we learned the results of an army investigation done at the time of Bergdahl&amp;#039;s disappearance. It backs up what some fellow soldiers have already said, that Bergdahl walked away from his base willingly. No, no, no, Martha. It did not happen for&amp;quot;a variety of reasons.&amp;quot; It happened for one reason only -- the Republican party, and the conservative movement that provides it its only real political energy, and the political institutions and media that provide it a platform, are all completely demented. Otherwise, there would have been a similar outcry over the dozens of Gitmo detainees freed by the Avignon Presidency. Otherwise, Bergdahl&amp;#039;s parents -- and his father&amp;#039;s beard -- would have been out of bounds. Otherwise, there wouldn&amp;#039;t be Republican hacks putting together a sophisticated operation to Swift Boat Bergdahl the moment he got out of the cage. This is about the ongoing campaign of ruination aimed at a twice-elected (black) president whom the assembled wingnuts do not approve. That&amp;#039;s the cause. Everything else is effect.  RADDATZ: Finally, there&amp;#039;s how the deal was handled politically, like the startling comments from National Security Adviser Susan Rice about Bergdahl to George right here on This Week. SUSAN RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: He served the United States with honor and distinction. RADDATZ: The administration is still defending those comments, saying Rice was talking about Bergdahl&amp;#039;s service before he walked away from base. But he was in less than a year and did nothing that stood out.  You know what &amp;quot;stood out,&amp;quot; Martha, especially among the political claque currently making the Bergdah family&amp;#039;s life miserable? He signed up. He showed up. He went there. Ask any of the people who are presently slandering him for their own cheap politics why they didn&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;stand out&amp;quot; that way. Speaking of stalwart watchmen on the parapets of national security, Congressman Mike Rogers stopped by. You may remember Mike. He&amp;#039;s the one whose sense of civic duty is so profound that he&amp;#039;s giving up one of the most important intelligence posts in the Congress to engage America&amp;#039;s enemies in a more direct way...by being a radio talk-show host. He would like America to know how fecklessly the president has endangered the country by releasing the Taliban SuperFriends. Bill from Livonia, you&amp;#039;re next... ROGERS: The focus have all been should -- you know, is this -- is one soldier worth it, it -- not worth it? I think that completely misses the problem here. This is a huge regional and geopolitical problem for the United States moving forward. Hostages are now currency in this war on terror. That&amp;#039;s always dangerous for both diplomats, aide workers, soldiers on the battlefield. But secondly, think about what happened in the last week. America said we&amp;#039;re leaving in 2016 completely. We negotiated with the terrorist Haqqani network. Oh, and by the way, this happened before the election even occurred. This weekend, this weekend, the Taliban tried to assassinate one of the political leaders, Abdullah Abdullah, who&amp;#039;s running for office in Afghanistan. This was the wrong message at the wrong time and we are going to pay for this decision for years... no, well, the administration has this theory that you&amp;#039;re either with them or you&amp;#039;re for thermonuclear war and there&amp;#039;s not in between. That&amp;#039;s just wrong. And so the reason they avoided Congress, this isn&amp;#039;t about we didn&amp;#039;t get invited to the party, so -- so we shouldn&amp;#039;t have our feelings hurt, it is because we can empower all of the people -- diplomats -- who disagreed with this decision, uh, intelligence folks who disagreed with this decision, military folks. That voice never got heard in the final discussions leading up to this deal.That&amp;#039;s why you engage with Congress. We can empower those voices. We can get those questions asked so you don&amp;#039;t make a mistake that actually might jeopardize diplomats, aide workers and soldiers as we move forward. And that&amp;#039;s what my fear is, as we move forward in this. I&amp;#039;m sorry, but is Mike Rogers one of those Republicans who mysteriously slept through the 1980&amp;#039;s? One thing&amp;#039;s for sure. He&amp;#039;s got the drive-time patter down.  STEPHANOPOULOS: A final question. Lindsey Graham... ROGERS: Yes? STEPHANOPOULOS: -- has raised the prospect of impeachment. If President Obama releases more Guantanamo prisoners without approval from Congress. Should impeachment be on the table? ROGERS: Well, again, I -- you know, that&amp;#039;s -- that&amp;#039;s a long way down this road...   Way to go, Mike. Leave all them options open. And good luck in your new career pitching auto glass and male enhancement products. Meanwhile, over on CBS, ratings titan and onetime Duke of Wellington reality-show producer Bob Schieffer brought on Democratic nuisance Dianne Feinstein further to undermine a president of her own party because Congressional fee-fees were injured. FEINSTEIN: I-- I just can&amp;#039;t say but I-- I think this whole sort of &amp;quot;deal&amp;quot; has been one that the-- the administration has kept very close. And in the eyes of many of us, too close, because it has a long history going back to 2011 when it was part of a major reconciliation effort with the Taliban and we were consulted and the concern there was that the confidence-building measure was upfront and that measure was the release of these five Taliban detainees. And there was feeling that if you release them upfront, there would be no reconciliation. If you release them after progress or at the end and have the agreement to to do so that you might get a reconciliation agreement and that subsequently apparently fell apart. So there are concerns over-- and-- and I heard John Kerry this morning say, you know, don&amp;#039;t worry about them in Doha. Yeah, you can&amp;#039;t help but worry about them in Doha. I&amp;#039;ve been to Doha. Spent 13 days there once. If I ever had to go back, I&amp;#039;d start digging the tunnel the minute my feet hit the tarmac. But one of the reasons that the retired court scribe to the Doge Of Venice is kicking the competition&amp;#039;s ass these days is because his producers do smart things like bringing on David Rohde, a journalist who once actually was captured and held by the opposition in Afghanistan, and who could speak with some authority about the news over the weekend that Bergdahl has told doctors that he was maltreated after attempting to escape. ROHDE: I mean it sounds very credible to me. I was kidnapped by the exact same Taliban faction. This the Haqqani Network. They work very closely with the Pakistani military. I was able to escape. I had an Afghan help me take me to a Pakistani military base. Bowe Bergdahl didn&amp;#039;t have that. So the reports are credible. And I also think that Bowe Bergdahl needs to answer why he walked off that base. But I would really caution Americans, this is, you know, there&amp;#039;s all these rumors that came out during my case and many of them were not true. And it&amp;#039;s really important to sort of wait and get the facts here. Clearly, this young feller is no Mike Rogers. You have no future in talk radio, my friend. Then again, the former Botany Bay prison reformer undid all the good he&amp;#039;d done by hosting a &amp;quot;roundtable&amp;quot; that featured not only Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins, but also Michael Gerson, the former word-&amp;#039;ho for C-Plus Augustus and now a visiting scholar at Fred Hiatt&amp;#039;s House Of Hacks in Washington. Both, of course, were Deeply Concerned about everything the feckless blackamoor in the White House was up to over the past week. This Deep Concern apparently has caused them to forget that they were both employees of a truthless administrations. Gerson worked for one that lied us into a war and Noonan worked for one that traded missiles to the mullahs for the release of the hostages of an earlier time. GERSON: Well, I think part of the problem here is the President told a simple moral story, the return of a hero when, in fact, it was a very complex moral story, ethical story, geostrategic story. So he gave a tragic choice, the trappings of victory and then he alienated a lot of people in the process, alienated members of Congress, who didn&amp;#039;t feel consulted. But alienated members of the unit that the man came from. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re either with us or against us.&amp;quot; Then there was a brief David Gergen interlude -- or, as we aficionados of the form refer to them, &amp;quot;A Human Thorazine Coma.&amp;quot; GERGEN: But the way they then presented it ignited this firestorm because it showed so little understanding of how people in the military, in the active duty militaries saw him and saw what he had done. And I-- I think it-- in some degree reflects the Gulf that is between the one percent who served today and the rest of the civilian population. Most of the people who work in the White House have never been in the military. Dick Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. John Yoo. David Addington. Need I go on? Speaking of &amp;quot;walking away from one&amp;#039;s post,&amp;quot; as far as I know, Garry Trudeau&amp;#039;s offer of $1000 to anyone who recalled actually seeing C-Plus Augustus at his duty station in Alabama is still on the table. No matter, because La Noonan was there to be Deeply Concerned about how the White House handled the whole business. NOONAN: On this one, they messed all that up in a way that is almost startling. And I would say could I just back up David&amp;#039;s point, it seems to me this White House thought desertion on the field of battle was like not handing in your homework or dropping out of Yale Law after one year. Do you know what I mean, they have no idea what that means. Yes, the feckless blackamoor is incapable of brilliant initiatives like sending advisors to Teheran with a Bible and a cake shaped like a key. Why are the canaries screaming, Clarice? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20946/the-bergdahlian-gobshites/>