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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which, of course, is what Chopin would have come up with had he composed Mayonnaise In A. First of all, some gobshite housekeeping: Can this possibly be true? Dancin&amp;#039; Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party losing to Face the Nation, hosted by former Tyler Administration War Department correspondent Bob Schieffer? Yes, there does appear to be a little jiggery-pokery going on with how the ratings match-up is scored, but the NBC people are beginning to sound like Willard Romney&amp;#039;s people trying to explain the polls in Ohio.... If &amp;quot;Meet the Press&amp;quot; is judged on a full hour&amp;#039;s worth of ratings, so should &amp;quot;Face the Nation,&amp;quot; said Erika Masonhall, NBC News spokeswoman. &amp;quot;We are constantly now forced to fight back against a false narrative about the state of the Sunday morning public affairs programs,&amp;quot; she said. That narrative: NBC is struggling on Sunday compared with surging CBS. Can we have a three-week moratorium on the word &amp;quot;narrative&amp;quot; please? It&amp;#039;s perilously close to the more common pundit&amp;#039;s phrase, &amp;quot;Makin&amp;#039; shit up.&amp;quot; (Also, too: Is it possible that Meet the Press and John McCain is losing tiny bits of its audience to the superior panel shows hosted by Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry over on little brother, MSNBC? I&amp;#039;d like to think so, anyway.) Anyway, before we get on to the extended exercises on Sunday, on which the Dancin&amp;#039; Master nearly called Bibi Netanyahu the king of the Jews \u2014 and how&amp;#039;d that work out for the last guy, anyway? \u2014 and on which Zombie Czechoslovakia arose again in Europe, we should dispense with what a lot of the catz &amp;#039;n kittenz are yapping about today, which may well have Willard&amp;#039;s folks reaching for the antifreeze. If Allen and VandeHei feel safe enough to go over the side of the S.S. Sycophant, then your campaign is taking on water faster than the pumps can handle it. However, one must read this piece carefully to note the subtle sucking-up that is still going on. For example: To pin recent stumbles on Stevens would be to overlook Romney&amp;#039;s role in all this. As the man atop the enterprise \u2014 in effect, the CEO of a $1 billion start-up \u2014 Romney ultimately bears responsibility for the decisions he personally oversaw, such as the muffling of running mate Paul Ryan&amp;#039;s strict budget message and his own convention performance. See, Stu Stevens, whom the authors may need as a source in the future, isn&amp;#039;t the lead fk-up in the parade. Willard, whom they will never need again once he&amp;#039;s cast into the Gehenna that is Malibu for losing to the Kenyan Muslim Usurper, is most to blame. He is especially at fault for &amp;quot;muffling&amp;quot; Paul Ryan who, I suspect, will go back to being a budget genius in Politico once again when and if the campaign augers in. Yes, the biggest problem the Romney campaign has is that it hasn&amp;#039;t explicitly called for more zombie-eyed granny-starving. As Broadway legend Max Bialystock would say...Genius! (You will also note that the zombie-eyed granny-starver&amp;#039;s own convention speech gets nary a mention, despite that fact that it was such a farrago of obvious horse-hockey that even TV pundits noticed. It also blew up the news cycle in advance of Romney&amp;#039;s own speech, and has now fastened on the whole convention a reputation for towering mendacity that will hang upon it as long as conventions are held. What we get in this piece is a brief description of how fast people wrote it. These boys know where their cocktail weenies will be coming from.) Some Romney loyalists think Stevens never fully appreciated what a good and unique candidate they had in Romney, and pleaded early on to showcase what they saw as a generous, wise and gifted leader. &amp;quot;Some Romney loyalists&amp;quot; \u2014 coughFehrnstromcough \u2014 appear to believe they are running a campaign in North Korea. A while back, I got in a wrangle with David Shuster about why TV bookers insisted on presenting carny barkers like Liz Cheney as &amp;quot;experts&amp;quot; on anything. (Note that I am wearing a tie there. Call your friends.) Back then, Daddy&amp;#039;s Little Deferment was flirting with birtherism. On Sunday, though, she mentioned an Obama foreign-policy failure that had eluded most observers, mainly because nobody noticed the time machine the president had built on the South Lawn. And, you know, I would disagree with George to the extent that we&amp;#039;ve now had three-and-a-half years of Obama policy, and it looks an awful lot like, whether you&amp;#039;re talking about the Mexico City speech in 2009, the Cairo speech in 2009, the extent to which he&amp;#039;s been apologizing for America, he&amp;#039;s abandoned some of our key allies, like Israel, Poland,Czechoslovakia, he&amp;#039;s attempted to appease our enemies, the Iranians, for example, the Russians. I, for one, also am distressed at the way he handled the problem of the nations that were carved out of the former Ottoman Empire. This Week With The Handsome Young Clinton Hack, guest-hosted by Fox News elder sibling and Brit Hume In Training, Jake Tapper, also featured a lot of talk about America&amp;#039;s E.D., especially in the Middle East, where Those Special Moments seem to go a&amp;#039;glimmering. He posed this question to Dr. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., whom Tapper apparently believes is a urologist: TAPPER: Look at this map, if you would. There have been protests around the world over the last several days. And President Obama pledged to repair America&amp;#039;s relationships with the Muslim world. Why does the U.S. seem so impotent? And why is the U.S. even less popular today in some of these Muslim and Arab countries than it was four years ago? RICE: Jake, we&amp;#039;re not impotent. We&amp;#039;re not even less popular, to challenge that assessment. I don&amp;#039;t know on what basis you make that judgment. But let me \u2014 let me point... TAPPER: It just seems that the U.S. government is powerless as this \u2014 as this maelstrom erupts.  For indigenous maelstroms lasting more than four hours, please consult your physician. Over at the Dancin&amp;#039; Master&amp;#039;s house, Netanyahu spent a lot of time denying his involvement in the U.S. elections by getting up to his eyeballs in the U.S. elections. (Bibi at least has been watching a lot of the NFL Network: &amp;quot;Well, the way I would say it David is they are in the red zone. You know, they are in the last 20 yards. And you can&amp;#039;t let them cross that goal line.&amp;quot; I think if we can hold Iran to a field goal, we have a real shot in the fourth quarter myself.) This prompted a remarkable colloquy in which the Dancin&amp;#039; Master appeared briefly to channel noted deceased foreign-policy expert, Pontius Pilate. There are tens of millions of Americans who are watching that speech, who hear that rhetoric, who hear that charge, who may not understand the complexities of this issue. You are the leader of the Jewish people. Gregory has since walked this one back, but I&amp;#039;m not entirely sure it&amp;#039;s possible to do that completely. How many young Pontiuses have you met in your life anyway? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15770/mitt-romney-politico-story-12789894/>