Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Stephen Stills would have come up with, had he composed "For What? It's Worse."

I was going to award the House Cup to my man Chuck Todd, for being the latest stop on the David Brooks All The Best People Tour of the Americas. Brooks has spent a couple of weeks now as the snooty maitre d' of the third-rate Maryland roadhouse that is the Beltway Intelligentsia, gathering all the very important minds around him, since he now apparently has spaces for entertaining that are considerably less vast. However, the Night Shift removed the piss from Mr. Brooks in a very effective way, and there's not much left to say, except to tell you that I am really worried about Moral Hazard. If this keeps up, he's going to wind up as one of those Sarah McLachlan dogs, peering mournfully through the chicken wire along some snowy road in backwoods Pennsylvania.

And there certainly is a fodder-rich environment developing around David Petraeus after last Friday's peculiar news dump that the Department of Justice and the FBI are looking at him crossways because, unlike Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information because he thought the American people needed to know what was being done in their name, Petraeus may have done it to get laid. (For the record, I think the DOJ may be breaking two tons of rock for a pennyweight crime, but Jim Risen must be amused.) Anyway,Dianne Feinstein thinks the poor manhas suffered enough. This could get tres amusante, as we say along snowy roads in backwoods Pennsylvania. Over at his home base, former Tokugawa Shogunate mouthpiece Bob Schieffer wanted to know if Attorney General Eric Holder was going to pass the buck to his successor -- despite the fact that it is now no better than pick 'em that Holder will have any successor at all.

SCHIEFFER: General Holder, on another subject, "The New York Times"

reported and we have confirmed through our own sources at the Justice

Department that the FBI and federal prosecutors want to bring charges

against former CIA Director David Petraeus for passing classified

information to his then girlfriend. We're told that you will make the final decision. Will you make that decision, or will you leave that to your predecessor?

HOLDER: Well, at this point, I don't want to comment on that which is an ongoing investigation.The

determination in any case is made at the time that all of the evidence

has been acquired, all of the evidence has been reviewed, when it has

been gone over with people who are the subjects of the investigation and

with their lawyers. And so, at the appropriate time, the proper people

within the Justice Department will make determinations as to what, if

any action should occur.

SCHIEFFER: Well, would that proper person be you or will it be someone else?

HOLDER: Well, it's hard to say. In terms of timing, I will be in office until my successor is confirmed.

And then it was off for some serious mongering of The Fear, this time from Congressman Mike McCaul, who is from Texas, which is a problem in and of itself, but who also is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, which is going to make him even more of a nuisance as the next couple of years go by. Don't stay in bed, folks, because They're coming to kill you there.

MCCAUL: That could happen here in the United States. We have had thousands of

these Western travelers that have become foreign fighters in Syria,

Iraq and Yemen that pose a threat and a risk returning to where they

came from, and to do the same thing that we saw in Paris. In

addition, you hear a lot about the homegrown violence, lone wolf, if you

will. We have heard lot about that and radicalizing over the Internet,

but it's this foreign fighter piece that disturbs me greatly, because we

don't have a good handle, intelligence-wise, who is on the ground in

Syria, in Iraq and Yemen to identify them, to put them on no-fly lists

so they can't get into the country.

We also have problems with lone-wolf infestationin Pennsylvania, in Georgia,and in Colorado.And we don't even have to do the paperwork on a no-fly list.

However, the House Cup goes this week to This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, which introduced us to one of McCaul's partners in nuisance, Senator Richard Burr of the newly insane state of North Carolina, who has ascended simultaneously to the positions of Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the informal position of Not As Mean And/Or Nutty As The Other Guy. Heretofore one of the most obscure senators not named Mike Crapo, but the possessor of one of the Senate's more indelible nicknames (Bank Run Burr), Burr is hitting the ground running, folks.

BURR:But when you look around the world, whether it's in Yemen, whether it's

in Syria, whether it's in Iraq, whether it's in Afghanistan or in North

Africa with Boko Haram, we've got terrorist elements that are carrying

out terrorist acts and if you put that collection together, what you've

got is a war on Western civilization. It really doesn't matter which

terrorist group we insert into the blank. The commitment is that they're

out to kill innocent people. And whether it happens in Paris or London

or New York, we've got to collectively do our best to make sure that we

thwart those attacks.

Oh, Christ, are we back to the Clash of Civilizations again? That's worked out very badly over the past decade or so. Actually, Bank Run, as we learned to our great distress in Iraq, it really does matter which terrorist group we "insert into the blank." A new Congress means new gobshites come out to play. Moron labe, baby.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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