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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Goffin and King would have come up with had they composed &amp;quot;Up On The Goofs.&amp;quot; We begin this week with a pair of curiosities, by which I mean curious events on the Sunday Showz that do not involve the tiny cartoon canaries that flit about the ears of Peggy Noonan. Over on NBC, the Dancin&amp;#039; Master got himself in all kinds of odd trouble when he did a segment on the one-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. As part of the segment, he invited on the program Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost a leg in the bombing. Haslet-Davis ended up walking off the set in tears. Later, she said that NBC had promised that they would not use the names of the Tsarnaev brothers during her interview, and then had reneged on that promise. Haslet-Davis said she felt &amp;quot;disrespected.&amp;quot; NBC said that no such guarantee was given. Up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), many cows were had regarding the way Haslet-Davis was treated. However, the story has shifted a bit over the ensuing day. Haslet-Davis now says that she walked off when the NBC producers said they couldn&amp;#039;t guarantee that the Tsarnaevs wouldn&amp;#039;t be mentioned, which is an entirely different thing. (If the producers had made that promise, and then suckered Haslet-Davis, they would be truly loathsome. But it seems now as though her withdrawal was unilateral. She made a demand. NBC declined to comply. She left. Two tie, all tie.) And it is very hard to disagree with former Boston police commissioner Ed Davis in his opinion that you can&amp;#039;t discuss the events of last year with mentioning the names of the two individuals who allegedly brought them about. &amp;quot;But I found out over the first few weeks of dealing with this that there&amp;#039;s so many questions and so many concerns, that dealing with it directly required that we talk directly about the individuals involved in it,&amp;quot; Davis said. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like to give them any publicity, but I think so that the country understands exactly what happened and so it doesn&amp;#039;t happen again, this review process and discussion of it one more time is necessary.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s an interesting case study in the end products of the kind of victim sanctification that goes on after events like the bombing, especially on the local news. Producers go hard for empathy and, occasionally, the actual news gets drowned out by a wobbly chorus of sanctimony and violin music. It is journalistic malpractice to decline to name the perpetrators simply because you consider the crime they committed to be particularly heinous. Megyn Kelly&amp;#039;s decision not to use the name of the Fort Hood shooter is silly posturing. Would our understanding of the 9/11 attacks be enhanced if we&amp;#039;d never heard the name of Mohammad Atta? We can understand the feelings of the victims, and even empathize with them, but reporting is a hard business and it owes its first debts to truth and to history. Unless, as I said, NBC made promises on which it reneged, which would be despicable, and also is something that even Haslet-Davis seems unclear about, then its primary responsibility is to the truth of the events under discussion, and not to the understandable pain of the victims. Then, on a much lighter note, we have onetime Holy Roman Empire defense department correspondent Bob Schieffer&amp;#039;s explanation for how he lined up his guests for Face The Nation. Bob explained that they rousted John McCain out of bed &amp;quot;at six o&amp;#039;clock in the morning (!)&amp;quot; to talk about events in the Ukraine. Jesus H. Christ in the makeup chair, does anyone actually believe that? John McCain can hear the sound of a camera&amp;#039;s being plugged in at a distance of 20 miles. If he goes five consecutive hours without being on television, he gets the bends and has to be hospitalized. If he doesn&amp;#039;t have a light-rail shuttle from his basement to the studios in Washington, it&amp;#039;s only because he hasn&amp;#039;t completed the tunnel yet. There are camera hounds and there are camera hogs. John McCain is a camera black hole. So, no, Bob, I am not impressed that you managed to talk this diffident chap out of his seclusion to say the same goddamn things he&amp;#039;s been saying for two months. If you hadn&amp;#039;t, he&amp;#039;d be out front, laying siege to your offices. Yeesh. Those two odd events aside, there was some vintage gobshitery on display in the regular course of events. Bob, for example, also hosted Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, the exceedingly dim representative from Tennessee, who now is flirting with a run for president because what the hell, Bachmann&amp;#039;s retiring. With not a sliver of evidence to back her up, Blackburn slid easily into fact-free slander regarding the choice of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to replace Kathleen Sebelius. No, it&amp;#039;s not to quiet the controversy, Bob. I think it&amp;#039;s quite the opposite. Burwell is an interesting choice and I think there are many of us and probably a bit of a growing consensus. They know they have a math problem with Obamacare and the numbers are not going to work out so that the program is actuarially sound and they are going to have to have somebody come and spin the numbers and this is something with Burwell coming from OMB, I think they are expecting her to be able to for them. How many of these seven million have paid... Perhaps still exhausted from the effort required to crowbar John McCain in front of a camera, Bob declined to point out that Blackburn was standing proudly atop Bullshit Mountain with her freak flag waving in the breeze. We have had our fun with conservative mole Jonathan Karl, who now regularly contributes to This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, but Karl did a nifty job helping Senator Aqua Buddha make a fool of himself. You may recall that a tape surfaced recently in which Aqua Buddha was heard claiming that Dick Cheney wanted a war in Iraq so that he and his cronies at Halliburton could get rich. Hurray, Aqua Buddha! Now, though, he&amp;#039;s running for president, and The Evil One still has a number of fans in the Republican party, so Aqua Buddha now had to square his previous statements with his current ambition. 4:59:57...4:59:58...4:59:59...  PAUL: I&amp;#039;m not questioning his motives. KARL: Sure looked like you were questioning his motives. PAUL: Well, here&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m questioning, I don&amp;#039;t think Dick Cheney did it out of malevolence, I think he loves his country as much as I love the country... KARL: But you said we don&amp;#039;t want our defense to be defined by people who make money off the weapons. Are you suggesting that&amp;#039;s why we went to war in Iraq? PAUL: No. No. KARL: That our defense was being defined by people who make money off weapons? PAUL: No. And that&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m also saying that I&amp;#039;m not questioning Dick Cheney&amp;#039;s motives. There&amp;#039;s a chance for a conflict of interest. At one point in time, he was opposed going into Baghdad. Then he was out of office and involved in the defense industry and then he became for going into Baghdad.  AND HE STICKS THE LANDING! See &amp;quot;Stump, As Dumb As&amp;quot; for further details. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30997/gobshites-041414/>