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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Liszt would have come up with had he composed Sardine Pail. Sometimes, I think I should blame the bookers, most of whom are 11-years old and believe that history is whatever came in over the BlackBerry 15 minutes ago. Sometimes, I blame the hosts, because they get paid a lot of money to reduce all of our politics to whatever they talked about over dinner the night before. Sometimes, I blame the whole damn incestuous culture of our political elite in which the only things that will get you cast away east of Eden is to have been right about something when everybody else was wrong about it. (The Iraq war, the efficacy of stimulus spending, the essential corruption of elite political journalism, Being Nate Silver.) And then, sometimes, like yesterday, I just throw up my hands and ponder how much happier I would be if I lived in a tree and played the flute for a living. (Thank you, men of Firesign, for your inspirational career advice.) This week&amp;#039;s episode of Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party was one of those times. The discussion turned, as we might have expected it would, to the decisions by the Supreme Court regarding marriage equality. Kindly Doc Maddow was brought on to shout, &amp;quot;Hoorah!&amp;quot; for the Court. By the Iron Law of punditry, this requires that some prominent bigots be rounded up to take the other position. Otherwise, people would yell about NBC on the talk radio all week and make the news executives at that network hide under the bed, and make Tom Brokaw have a Sad about the state of American civility. (If bigots are not allowed to speak, how will we ever reach bipartisan compromise, like we did when we beat Hitler in that obscure war that Tom Brokaw discovered in a dusty volume in the public library back in South Dakota?) Anyway, they brought out Jim DeMint, who once ran a campaign in which he said gay people ought not to be schoolteachers, let alone husbands and wives and mommies and daddies. But they also brought out Ralph Reed who not only held up his end of things, bigot-wise, but also represents by his very presence on the program everything that&amp;#039;s wrong with our elite political culture, and the best argument for dumping the whole genre in favor of running more pilates informercials.  RACHEL MADDOW: He says that by denying marriage rights to same-sex couples who have kids, you&amp;#039;re humiliating and demeaning those kids by denying their families equal protection under the law by the parents who are raising them and who love them and who make their family. We can put it in the interests of children, but I think that cuts both ways. And I think the ruling cuts against that argument. I mean, gay people exist. There&amp;#039;s nothing we can do in public policy that makes more or us exist or less of us exist. And these guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist. But you don&amp;#039;t make any less of us exist, you just are arguing in favor of discrimination. And more discrimination doesn&amp;#039;t make straight people&amp;#039;s-- RALPH REED: I can&amp;#039;t-- RACHEL MADDOW:...lives any better. RALPH REED: David, I really can&amp;#039;t let that go. I mean, this suggestion that because somebody wants to affirm the institution of marriage that they&amp;#039;re ipso facto intolerant? By that argument, Barack Obama was intolerant 14 months ago. By that argument, 342 members of the House, 85 members of the Senate (including, by the way, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, Pat Leahy) who all voted for this law, and Bill Clinton who signed it into law, were intolerant and motivated by an animus and a hatred for gays. RACHEL MADDOW: They&amp;#039;ve all changed their mind on it.  (Note to KDM: The answer to Reed&amp;#039;s question is, yes, they were all intolerant at the time DOMA was passed, and it was passed because Bob Dole&amp;#039;s presidential campaign was going to make marriage equality a Thing that the Clinton campaign didn&amp;#039;t want to talk about.) See, here&amp;#039;s the thing. Ralph Reed is not just a bigot. If he were just a bigot, then you could put him in the bigot&amp;#039;s chair on the panel and still maintain some sense of propriety. But the problem with Ralph Reed is that he&amp;#039;s also kind of a dingy crook. He was one of the main bozos in Jack Abramoff&amp;#039;s Amazing Carnival Of Grift And Wonders. Then, Mr. Abramoff&amp;#039;s crazily ambitious lobbying operation collapsed. He was charged with overbilling his 10 Indian clients by $25 million, out of the astounding $85 million in fees he had collected from them. Jack had worked his 10 little Indians by pretending that he was protecting each one&amp;#039;s casino turf from the others-and also from encroachments by state lotteries, state and federal taxation, and video gambling interests (which Mr. Abramoff also represented). It was an amazing grift-but he couldn&amp;#039;t have done it without his old buddies. He got Mr. Norquist&amp;#039;s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) $1.5 million to fight nefarious, big-government efforts to tax Indian slots. Mr. Norquist in turn funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Mr. Reed, who had e-mailed Mr. Abramoff, in his usual ecclesiastical language, &amp;quot;I need to start humping in corporate accounts ...&amp;quot; and promised to mobilize &amp;quot;3,000 pastors and 90,000 religious conservative households&amp;quot; in Alabama alone to oppose new gambling ventures on religious principle. He also decided he could turn a buck on 21st Century, free-market slavery. Once again, the triumvirate worked like a well-oiled machine to defend this horror. Mr. Abramoff raked in some $9 million in lobbying fees. Mr. Norquist received thousands of dollars in return for talking up the Northern Marianas as &amp;quot;a model of free enterprise&amp;quot; and having &amp;quot;discussions&amp;quot; with the islands&amp;#039; leaders. His ATR staff received junkets to the islands-as did some 100 congressmen and their families, including Tom DeLay, who pronounced the islands &amp;quot;a perfect petri dish of capitalism&amp;quot; and told its leaders, &amp;quot;You are a shining light for what is happening in the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we&amp;#039;re trying to do in America, in leading the world in the free-market system.&amp;quot; Ralph Reed was onboard to work the religious angle, sending out a mailer to the faithful charging that &amp;quot;The radical left, the Big Labor Union Bosses, and Bill Clinton want to pass a law preventing Chinese from coming to work on the Marianas Islands&amp;quot; because they &amp;quot;are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ&amp;quot; on the islands, and many &amp;quot;are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.&amp;quot; There was no mention of their discarded fetuses. There are dozens of perfectly articulate bigots who aren&amp;#039;t tied in with crooked lobbyists and discarded fetuses who nonetheless would be more than happy to come on TV and explain to Kindly Doc Maddow why Jesus thinks she is a lesser form of human. Hell, you should pardon the expression, Jim DeMint is several of them all by himself. Why does NBC go out of its way to help rehabilitate someone whom, if the American political system had a functioning immune system, would have been devoured by its phagocytes years ago? Why isn&amp;#039;t everybody else on that set vomiting into their hands at the very presence of Ralph Reed in their midst? The man is human e.coli.  Moving along to This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, we find ourselves on less odious, and more familiar, rhetorical ground because Our Lady Of The Dolphins took it into her head to lie about Wendy Davis down there in Texas, who stood alone and temporarily stopped Governor Goodhair&amp;#039;s attempt to rescue all the Snowflake Jeebus Babies from the imaginary villains who stalk them through the stalagmites on the Noonanian wilderness. But, first, Julian Assange stopped by in order to explain how he&amp;#039;s saving the world these days. But look, let&amp;#039;s pull back a bit. Why is it that Mr. Snowden is not in the United States? He should feel that he should be afforded justice in the United States. But his situation is very similar to a situation that I face and that my staff face where we have been sucked into a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that&amp;#039;s where the charges for Mr. Snowden came from, Alexandria, Virginia. What do we know about that district? It&amp;#039;s six kilometers from the center of Washington, D.C., the jury pool is made up of the CIA, Pentagon, et cetera. In the legal community in the United States, it&amp;#039;s known as the rocket docket because of the lack of scrutiny procedures have there. There&amp;#039;s a 99 percent chance that -- a 99.97 percent chance that if you&amp;#039;re a target of the grand jury you&amp;#039;ll be indicted. And a 99 percent that if you&amp;#039;re indicted by a grand jury you will be convicted. OK, so let&amp;#039;s change the venue. You think you have a better shot in, say, Wichita? Birmingham? Tucson? And if your lawyers allow any CIA officials to get through voir dire, then you need better lawyers. Luckily, though, The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs was there to step in and make Assange look like the only one on the panel who knows what&amp;#039;s really going on.  STEPHANOPOULOS: But these surveillance programs, as the president has pointed out, were passed by the Congress, are overseen by a court. RADACK: Well, both of those are incorrect. Congress has not been fully informed. Only the-- STEPHANOPOULOS: They passed the laws, there is oversight, or there is (inaudible). RADACK: OK, but there is a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which nobody knows, except for the Intel Committee of Congress, and even they say that they think most Americans would be appalled by that. And to say that it&amp;#039;s been approved by the courts is a misnomer, because it gives the impression that federal courts have approved this, when in reality, it&amp;#039;s the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has rubber-stamped every single- STEPHANOPOULOS: Which is a federal court. RADACK: No, it is a secret court set up at the Justice Department that has federal judges on it. But last year, it approved 2,000 out of 2,000 applications. They hear only the government&amp;#039;s side, and they have never -- they have rejected an application one time since 1978.   At this point, just say you&amp;#039;re doing it to keep the Bad Guys from killing us all. Making an argument for these programs based on effective oversight and the rule of law based on the FISA Court just makes you look stupid. You also give Julian Assange a chance to be both logical and a complete paranoid, all in the same breath.  STEPHANOPOULOS: Back in 2010, an email that was revealed from you by Bart Gellman in &amp;quot;Time&amp;quot; magazine, said that you hoped the revelations from Wikileaks would bring about, quote, &amp;quot;the total annihilation of the current U.S. regime.&amp;quot; Is that still your goal, and what did you mean by that? ASSANGE: I did not say that and there is no such email. That is simply false. STEPHANOPOULOS: It&amp;#039;s quoted in &amp;quot;Time&amp;quot; magazine in December 2010. ASSANGE: Yes. Well, I mean, &amp;quot;Time&amp;quot; magazine. But this is -- it&amp;#039;s very interesting that you raised such a thing like that. We are in a situation where we have these extraordinary revelations that are causing great embarrassment to a new national security state that is arising in the U.S. It&amp;#039;s not just the U.S. Similar national security states are rising in other countries, but it is trying to evade democratic will. It&amp;#039;s treating Congress like a bunch of fools.   It wasn&amp;#039;t until the Powerhouse Panel that Our Lady got her chance to shine on the topic of Wendy Davis. It is not often that you see such a perfect combination of airless condescension and complete ignorance in so few sentences. Well, it&amp;#039;s pretty often when Our Lady speaks, anyway. NOONAN: I think it will pass in a -- in a special session maybe on Monday or Tuesday. The aim -- the bill does not specifically try to close abortion clinics; it says they have to meet certain medical standards in order to operate. (Which are impossible to meet. If Our Lady thinks this is a public-health debate, she&amp;#039;s nuttier than I think she is, and that boggles the mind.) Here&amp;#039;s what -- in the story of this young woman, she&amp;#039;s so spirited. You know, she has such energy and she seems to have such commitment. (Davis is 50-years old.) But it seems to me -- and I think it seems to many Americans -- that what she is speaking for and standing for is something we would recognize as infanticide... (Nope. Not under the Constitution.) ...late-term abortion... (Incorrect. Shall me try again?) ...the taking of a little child&amp;#039;s life. (Sorry. Not a &amp;quot;little child.&amp;quot; Not according to the owner of your most revered foot, it isn&amp;#039;t. Thanks for playing, though.) That is really, really serious. And so part of me thinks that this is a fabulous young woman, and part of me thinks, oh, my goodness, we&amp;#039;re celebrating something that even in Europe they call a matter of brutality and barbarism. And part of you is surrounded by twittering cartoon canaries who sing sweetly of the days when you and I were young, mother. And we close, as we usually do, over on CBS, where former Theban special diplomatic correspondent Bob Schieffer managed to keep his panel discarded-fetus-free, but who managed to pry out of former head spook Michael Hayden the possibility that a Washington Post story about how, despite the government&amp;#039;s virtually undefeated record before it, the FISA Court is no rubber-stamp, by cracky, may have been something of a put-up job.  BOB SCHIEFFER: Story in the Washington Post this morning that basically said that critics are saying that the-- the secret court, the FISA court, that authorizes all of this was-- the story is-- some critics suggest that FISA was just a rubberstamp for whatever the administration wanted to do. The story says that you actually met with the FISA court-- GENERAL MICHAEL HAYDEN: I did. BOB SCHIEFFER: --judge who took great exception to that version of history. GENERAL MICHAEL HAYDEN: Right. BOB SCHIEFFER: Was that unusual for you to be meeting with her? GENERAL MICHAEL HAYDEN: It was. Normally, we-- we go down to the court to get warrants in a very routine manner. What was happening in the summer of 2004 was not at all routine. It was quite a different kind of court order that we were seeking. I-- I can&amp;#039;t go into the specific operational details but it was an unprecedented court order that we had to explain to Judge Kollar-Kotelly why we wanted it, what the tradeoffs would be, how we could manage it and then, frankly, take an awful lot of her guidance as to how we would have to do it if she were even to contemplate giving us a warrant to do it. BOB SCHIEFFER: About out of time here but let me just ask you--in your view, was the FISA court rubberstamping whatever the government wanted to do? GENERAL MICHAEL HAYDEN: No. No, not at all. And I know people point to the number of warrants we request and the number of warrants we get saying it&amp;#039;s rubberstamp. Actually, Bob, I would turn that on its head. That tells me we weren&amp;#039;t pressing the court hard enough. We weren&amp;#039;t giving them any tough decisions.  Boy, that&amp;#039;s some quality bullshit right there. The spooks get every warrant they ask for because every case they bring before the FISA court is so obvious and easy that the FISA Court can&amp;#039;t help but go along. This is enough to make me wonder if there&amp;#039;s room enough in the Ecuadorian embassy for all of us. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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