Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue, which is what Mendelsohn would have come up with if he'd written Concerto for Piano and Bolt Cutter.

Before we begin the general survey, we should congratulate Dancin' Master Dave Gregory for his ability to frame almost the perfect Russert-esque bogus gotcha session to White House advisor David Plouffe on Sunday's Meet the Press. There was the phony above-it-all god's eye view — apparently, it is inaccurate to say the president is on call "24/7" if the president happens to be appearing on The View — and then there mention of the "call" to fire U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice without mentioning that "the call" is coming from crackpot New York congressman and former terrorist sympathizer Peter King, and finally, there is the barbered quote serving as the big reveal....

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Again, that's:

GREGORY: The president has said as recently as May of this year that al Qaeda has not had a chance to rebuild, that al Qaeda has been defeated. There is an election on, as we've been talking about, and the president's challenger said plain and simple, the president failed to level with the American people and call this a terrorist attack, because you had to be concerned about another terrorist attack from al Qaeda in the Middle East after the president said that al Qaeda had been defeated.

Every part of this question, from its faulty premise to its phony conclusion, is arrant bullshit. The president never has said that al Qaeda "has not had a chance to rebuild" or that it has been "defeated." (You will also note that Gregory uses the "challenger said" technique to catapult Willard Romney's desperate hogwash into respectability. This, too, was a Russert specialty, as Dick Cheney's old flack once said under oath in a court of law.) In May — and I looked it up because I thought, damn, this president never has said anything that stupid in his life, that's Congressman Peter King Caliber stupid right there — this is what the president said, in a speech from Afghanistan:

Despite initial success, for a number of reasons, this war has taken longer than most anticipated. In 2002, bin Laden and his lieutenants escaped across the border and established safe haven in Pakistan. America spent nearly eight years fighting a different war in Iraq. And al Qaeda's extremist allies within the Taliban have waged a brutal insurgency. But over the last three years, the tide has turned. We broke the Taliban's momentum. We've built strong Afghan security forces. We devastated al Qaeda's leadership, taking out over 20 of their top 30 leaders. And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set -- to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild -- is now within our reach. Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over. But tonight, I'd like to tell you how we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan.

(The gang at Think Progress noticed this, too. Great minds etc.)

I defy anyone to find even an implication in that passage that would justify Gregory's question to Plouffe, let alone Gregory's playing Madame to Willard Romney's Wayland Flowers. (And Gregory could have been tough without being dishonest, and without so clearly wishing for a better horse race in November.) We usually play this feature for laffs, and we'll get back to that in a moment, but this is not funny. This is the kind of journalistic malpractice that brought us President George W. Bush and mushroom clouds and aluminum tubes and thousands and thousands of dead people.

Anyway, we continue.

It was Chris Christie Day as the governor of New Jersey spread himself a little thin, as it were, appearing on all three formerly major networks on the same day. (Tell me again that we're all not already living in 2016.) He was remarkably blowhardy on all of them. Basically, the theme was that it ain't over until it's over, and that the first debate is what everybody's been waiting for since this whole rigamarole began, and Nicely-Nicely's got the horse right here. This is what he said to the Dancin' Master:

But the fact of the matter is that in the end this is going to be about Governor Romney over the next four or five weeks laying that vision out for folks. And, you know, folks like us obsess about this stuff, David, but I got to tell you something the — the general public that I speak to in New Jersey and elsewhere are just beginning to really tune into this race. And so they're going to start tuning on Wednesday night and when they do, Governor Romney is going to lay out his vision for a better and greater America, for greater opportunity, for all of our citizens, and — and I think that's when you're going to see this race really start to tighten and then move — move in Governor Romney's direction.

And then, to former Pierce Administration Treasury correspondent Bob Schieffer:

We have a candidate who is going to do extraordinarily well on Wednesday night. The first time he has the opportunity to stand on the same stage with the President of the United States and the first time a majority of the people that are going to vote in this race will have an opportunity to make that direct comparison and see the two of them. When they do — I've seen Mitt Romney do this before. He's going to come in Wednesday night. He's going to lay out his vision for America. He's going to contrast what his view is and what the President's record is and the President's view for the future and this whole race is going to be turned upside down come Thursday morning.

And, finally, to This Week with the Young Clinton Aide Shocked by Blowjobs:

I mean, every time Mitt Romney has been confronted in this campaign with one of these moments, he has come through in the debate and performing extraordinarily well, laying out his vision very clearly, and also contrasting himself and his vision with whoever his opponent was at that time. So I have absolute confidence that, when we get to Thursday morning, George, all you're going to be shaking your head, saying it's a brand-new race with 33 days to go.

So, on Thursday morning, after the International Harvester Willard Romney has threshed away for 90 minutes, we are going to shake our heads because the race will be a brand-new race — can Herman Cain come back? — moving toward Governor Romney and it will be upside-down while it's doing so! What a thing. I can't wait.

The panels were a bit less clustery with fk than they usually are, although former William Pitt The Younger beat man Bob Schieffer did bring on travelling education grifter Michelle Rhee to praise the benefits of a bipartisan approach to making her ever more wealthy... er... education "reform."

I sit in a lot of conversations with Democrats, and they agree on a whole lot more than they disagree on. So it seems to me that both parties could come together and say, okay, we're going to put the partisan politics aside and-- and look out for the interests of kids, and let's-- let's focus on education first.

Actually, I think the interest that most of the people financing Ms. Rhee's career have in "the kids" is to pay them seven bucks an hour to work the fry pits. Over on ABC, however, former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour did some sleight-of-hand and made 1981 disappear entirely....

You compare the recovery under Obama — this year, the economy's improved at 1.6 percent. Last year, 1.8 percent. The year before, 2.4 percent. That's the best he's done. After the recession, when Reagan was president, the first year, 4.5-percent economic growth.

Yes, "after the recession," which was made so infinitely worse by the undistilled supply-side snake oil in the first Reagan budget that the Republicans got slaughtered in the 1982 midterms, things got better, which is rather like cutting off your foot and claiming, three years later, that your tap-dancing has improved.

And we conclude by returning to Dancin' Dave's Disco Dance Party, where criminal reptile Ralph Reed was allowed to slither back onto the national stage with his latest plan to sucker the rubes and the god-enfeebled throughout the land. Reed, from whom no thinking person would buy water if their head were on fire, and who never would have been allowed back in our national dialogue if it weren't the freak show that it is, got to call the president a liar....

Well, I think President Obama has, and I — I want to be charitable here, has a — a casual relationship with the truth. He's very eloquent. He's extremely articulate. He is very bright. Anybody who thinks otherwise, who thinks that when you untether him from the teleprompter that he didn't bring his A-game is underestimating him. But here is the problem. His words are very eloquent, very flowery, very — tickle your ears. But none of it is true. He said that unemployment would never go above 8 percent if we passed his stimulus plan. It's never gone below 8 percent. He said that he would cut the deficit in half in his first term. He's — he's doubled it, and he's increased the national debt by 50 percent. He said he would change Washington and put an end to the partisan rancor. Washington is more polarized and more paralyzed than it's been in the modern era. The Senate which his party controls has not passed a budget in three years. And we're 92 days from a fiscal cliff which the CBO says is going to plummet us into a double digit dip recession.

The Dancin' Master was not going to take that, however:

Those might be broken promises. I think people would challenge you on the idea that those...those things are lies.

Yes, you Vineyard dockwalloper, "people" would challenge the utter gall it takes for a proven con artist like Ralph Reed to call someone else's relationship with the truth "casual." Some of those "people" used to be called "newsmen."

Jesus, these people.

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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