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"  Welcome back to our weekly survey of Our National Dialogue, which, as should be obvious by now, is what the Gershwins would have come up with had they been composing for a herd of wildebeests. Once again, running and jumping and beach-volleyballing pre-empted Dancin&amp;#039; Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party on NBC, so that left us with only This Week With The Non-Reptilian Old Clinton Hand on ABC, and Face The Nation, hosted by former Cleveland Administration White House correspondent Bob Schieffer. Not to worry, though, because the former program brought Republican National Committee chairman and obvious anagram Reince Priebus, who is a nougat-y and creamy caramel cluster of fk all by himself. Before we begin, we should note for the record that Priebus ascended to his current position as the biggest cashew in the nut dish after being something of a complete and utter failure in his political career back in Wisconsin. In 2004, he ran for the state senate, outraised his incumbent opponent by three-to-one, and lost by four points. Then, he became state Republican chairman, which fast-tracked him into the job he has today. In short, those who can, win. Those who can&amp;#039;t, get appointed. Anyway, Reince went on the ABC show and got all hot and bothered about Harry Reid, and what Reid has been saying about what&amp;#039;s in those tax returns that Willard Romney apparently fed to Rafalca some time last year.... PRIEBUS: And as far as Harry Reid is concerned, listen, I know you might want to go down that road, I&amp;#039;m not going to respond to a dirty liar who hasn&amp;#039;t filed a single page of tax returns himself. Complains about people with money but lives in the Ritz Carlton here down the street. So if that&amp;#039;s on the agenda, I&amp;#039;m not going to go there. This is just a made-up issue. And the fact that we&amp;#039;re going to spend any time talking about it is ridiculous. STEPHANOPOULOS: You say you are not going to respond, but you just called him a dirty liar. You stand by that, you think Harry Reid is a dirty liar? PRIEBUS: I just said it. Okay, I&amp;#039;m with you, people \u2014 I don&amp;#039;t know what in the hell he means about Reid&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;not having filed a single page of tax returns himself.&amp;quot; But I think cracking the &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a dirty liar&amp;quot; barrier on network TV earns Reince a timeout before recess. He moved along, though, to some serious policy analysis that one usually hears from the political sage known as Bob On The Car Phone. PRIEBUS: George, here&amp;#039;s what I think. I think this president has got a problem with the American dream. You know, when I grew up -- and I know that both Republicans and Democrats listening to this right now agree with this \u2014 when I grew up, in a great place called Kenosha, Wisconsin, my dad was a union electrician, my mom was a realtor. We drove around town, and when my parents and we drove past a beautiful house on the corner, my parents didn&amp;#039;t point at the house and say, hey, look at this lousy people in this beautiful house. Look at this guy and his new Corvette. My dad did probably the same thing your dad did and a lot of dads out there. He turned around, and he said, listen, pal, if you work hard and you go to school, mom and dad, we hope you live in that house. We hope it&amp;#039;s two times bigger than that house. That&amp;#039;s the American dream. And this idea that we&amp;#039;re spending all of our time just killing people because they live the American dream and made something out of nothing and made money \u2014 I mean, this is crazy talk. And I just think we need to get back to the issues. Of course, Priebus now leads a party that has spent the last four decades ensuring that almost nobody can be a &amp;quot;union electrician&amp;quot; any more, and spent the previous couple of decades deregulating things so that a) the average &amp;quot;realtor&amp;quot; is greeting people at Wal-Mart, and b) &amp;quot;moms and dads&amp;quot; lost the houses that the realtor once sold them because gigantic banks gambled away their equity and their mortgages turned out to written in Klingon. And, as for the American dream, I think the son of a single mother who works his way through Harvard Law and gets elected to the U.S. Senate and then to the presidency despite being named Barack Hussein Obama, and despite the fact that doughpops like Reince Priebus are in positions of power understands it better than the runner-up in a state senate race from eight years ago. But that&amp;#039;s just me. We moved along to the &amp;quot;powerhouse panel,&amp;quot; which included, for some reason or another, Ann Coulter, fresh from her morning formaldehyde bath. Alas for us, she cued the Non-Reptilian Old Clinton Hand to bungle around with one of the great historical myths of our time: We&amp;#039;re going to get into one of the points that Ann makes, Van, is that Ronald Reagan was able to win, even with 7.2 percent unemployment back in 1984, because the trend was in much better shape than what the president is seeing now. The &amp;quot;trend&amp;quot; of which he speaks began in the depths of the recession of 1982, which was brought about because Saint Ronnie drank the supply-side goblet down to the stem, wrote a blank check to the Pentagon, and nearly collapsed the entire federal budget. The most recent near-collapse of the entire federal budget happened prior to this president&amp;#039;s taking office, so the Non-Reptilian fellow is comparing adam&amp;#039;s apples to oranges, if you get my drift. Then they all talked about that awful Harry Reid and how awful his charges were. Dirty politics offend George Effing Will, who once buried his knowledge that the Reagan campaign had penetrated the Carter White House sufficiently to purloin briefing materials, and declined to share that knowledge with his TV audience. He cited Joe McCarthy, the mere mention of whom must have delighted la Coulter down to the depths of where once there was a desiccated soul, replaced years ago by cheap chablis and bong resin. But the really outraged fellow was Jonathan Karl. Well, first of all, it&amp;#039;s one of the most outrageous charges that I&amp;#039;ve ever seen actually made on the Senate floor. (Ed. Note: Weren&amp;#039;t you, in 1998, the first reporter to glom a copy of the Starr Report? That had blowjobs in it.) Sometimes you see this stuff out, you know, first there was an interview with Huffington Post, that&amp;#039;s one thing, but when Harry Reid comes to the floor of the Senate and makes this outrageous charge that has absolutely no evidence \u2014 I mean, Mitt Romney paid $3.1 million to the IRS in the one tax return that we&amp;#039;ve seen so far. He paid taxes. (Ed. Note: Objection. Relevance. The return Romney has released are not the issue here.) It&amp;#039;s a completely false charge. (Ed. Note: You don&amp;#039;t know that any more than Reid does because we don&amp;#039;t have the returns.) But Reid loves it. The Democrats love this. Because no matter how much he digs in, no matter how much he gets attacked, you know, here or by Jon Stewart (Ed. Note: Wait. We seem to have a new metric here on what&amp;#039;s fair or unfair. The Stewart Meridian, beyond which politicians dare not cross.), or anywhere else, it gets the story out there again and again. Later, though, after Coulter got her chance to call JFK a &amp;quot;drug-addicted president&amp;quot; while everyone looked away and wondered how their lives had come to such a terrible pass as to be spending time with the shouty lady who feeds the pigeons in the park, the various very wealthy people on the panel got a chance to work out on the parasites who overextended themselves in the housing boom and now find themselves in the kind of trouble that George Effing Will believes they deserve. Will: 75 percent of mortgage holders who are under water are continuing to pay their mortgages. If you go to them now with competitive debt forgiveness \u2014 the president saying that maybe student loans should now be forgiven. Now we&amp;#039;re going to start forgiving this, breaking contracts \u2014 in a sense what they are \u2014 then you&amp;#039;re going to have a classic case of moral hazard, where the incentives are for perverse behavior, and you&amp;#039;re going to incentivize the 75 percent of honorable people paying their mortgages to stop. And the 75 percent of honorable people have several suggestions for Mr. Effing Will as to how he can incentive himself. Jesus, these people. If you&amp;#039;re not Fox News, or the proposed new TruTv reality show Withered Husks Of Humanity, and you willingly put Ann Coulter on your air, then you let the credibility horse out of the barn long ago, so let&amp;#039;s stop briefly over at CBS, where Bob Schieffer hosted former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O&amp;#039;Connor who said that, maybe, it was possible that the involvement of the Court in the case of Bush v. Gore that damaged the court&amp;#039;s credibility and prompted a feeling that the Court might be just a tad involved in politics more than it should be.... SANDRA DAY O&amp;#039;CONNOR: I&amp;#039;m not sure if there&amp;#039;s been some suggestion, again by poll takers, that \u2014 that trend down for the judicial branch began with the Bush-Gore decision. That was one that was widely talked about at the time, as you know, and involved the public in a presidential election and that could be something that triggered public reexamination. BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you think that people thought it was too political or the court had become too political? Is that? SANDRA DAY O&amp;#039;CONNOR: I \u2014 I&amp;#039;m not sure but I suppose that&amp;#039;s part of it, yes. And, of course, any time you&amp;#039;re deciding a case involving a presidential election, it&amp;#039;s awfully close to politics. Yes, Madam Justice, and that may very well be why, you know, no Supreme Court in the history of the country ever did it before. I need more synchronized diving, I think. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15175/harry-reid-romney-tax-returns-11397081/>